


between your bones and your soul

by skitzofreak



Series: stardust in your spine [4]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Massage, Mention of injuries, Recovery, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Therapy, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, medical jargon mascarading as sexy, rated just because I'm cautious, slightly out of chronological order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2018-12-07 20:17:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11631126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: Cassian is bad at healing. Jyn is unimpressed.Or: Jyn tries her hand at physical therapy.





	1. a song that guides me down this road

**Author's Note:**

> I am not a doctor, or a physical therapist, or a masseuse. Almost all of my information regarding anatomy, recommended therapy, or massage technique comes from the internet. Pretend any mistakes in the work are just Jyn misunderstanding the medical journals.

 

Cassian, Jyn knows, is a liar.

She doesn’t necessarily hold it against him; Cassian lies for the Alliance, for the war, for survival. He’s been honing the skill for decades, and it’s saved lives, especially his, more times than probably even _he_ remembers. And he can turn it off - or at least, he seems to make the effort for her. He hasn’t lied to her since Eadu, not since they ripped into each other with such brutal unbending honesty. He hasn’t even tried to conceal much from her, unless it’s classified, and then he simply tells her that instead.

Jyn might even accuse him of being a little too honest around her, except that would mean acknowledging the quiet way he watches her sometimes when he knows she sees him. Some truth, she’s not ready to hear. Not yet.

No, the problem isn’t that Cassian lies to the galaxy, because he does that for the cause. The problem isn’t that he lies to her, either, because he doesn’t. The problem, Jyn thinks with increasing frustration, is that Cassian lies to himself. More accurately, he lies to himself, _about_ himself. 

He tries to hide the limp, some days more successfully than others.  Jyn is rarely fooled. It’s been three months since Scarif, since everything, and Jyn knows Cassian’s body language by now. So she recognizes the stiffness in his shoulders, the deliberate way he makes almost every movement, the little tick at his jaw that means he’s biting his tongue to keep the pain off his face. She figures that it’s probably not his leg that’s bothering him. Jyn knows the nasty fracture in his tibia healed remarkably well.  That’s what his surgeon had said in a post-op write-up, “healing remarkably well, given the damage.” She knows _that_ because after she hears him tell the doctors that he feels “barely any pain at all, sir” when just that morning he had been gripping his chair with white knuckles, Jyn slices into the Alliance medical record system and downloads his entire file. She doesn’t look through his past – that feels wrong, somehow – but she reads everything about his Scarif injuries and treatments since, including patient interviews.

And yeah, Cassian is a liar.

The tibia fracture, the multiple hairline fractures across his ribs, the shallow but infected blaster shot across his right side, even the ruptured spleen – all healed, via successful surgeries and bacta immersions. It’s his spine, the three implant vertebrae that replace his original, cracked bones. The implants, his records tell Jyn, integrated nicely, but the damaged muscles – both those torn from the fall that she still sees in her nightmares and the ones the doctors cut themselves to reach the bones – those take longer to heal and adjust. It does not help at all that Cassian seems incapable of taking it easy, or spending the recommended hours in bed. “It’s not really that bad,” he tells anyone who asks why he isn’t resting. “I need to keep working more than I need to lie down.”

Maybe he even believes that. Jyn thinks otherwise, though. His medical scans can’t prove he’s in pain, they only show damage, and according to them, the stress of all that movement means that the muscles in his back are straining against each other. The post-op interviews she reads all indicate that Cassian says he’s healing well. The tight lines around his eyes and mouth (that no one else seems to _notice_ , Jyn thinks with great frustration) indicate that he is not.

Still, he refuses to stay in the medical ward, and he only takes his pain medications when it’s so bad that he can’t function. The physical therapy helps while he goes to it, but then a whole squadron of Pathfinders get into some dust up in the Mid-Rim and the Alliance’s meager medical ward is abruptly swamped with their wounded. Cassian quietly stops going to his sessions, and the frazzled doctors let it go.

Jyn, however, does not.

One morning shortly after he stops going to therapy, she’s sitting in the maintenance bay with him. She’s helping him repair a damaged astromech in what passes for their downtime, when he drops a hydrospanner and unthinkingly leans down to pick it up. The harsh gasp is almost lost in the noises of the busy space, but it pulls Jyn’s attention sharply up.

“Cassian?”

“Fine,” he says, a little too breathless to be convincing. “Just…tugged something, I think.”

She’s on her feet in a moment, but he’s already got one hand up to deflect. “It’s alright, Jyn, just a passing thing.” He smiles, but the edges are brittle and Jyn scowls back, unimpressed. It’s useless to mention the doctors, or ask if he’s taken his medications. He won’t lie, but he won’t _do it_ , either. Instead, she sits down heavily beside him and bumps his knee with her own.

“You should rest,” she starts, reproachfully.

“I am,” he cuts her off easily, gesturing idly towards the astromech. “This is very restful.”

“But you’re not _comfortable_ ,” she tries again, leaning in closer to emphasize her point. She feels awkward and uncertain despite her sincerity, because caring was never a skill that anyone bothered to teach her.

Cassian glances down to where her leg is now almost entirely pressed against his and says mildly, “You’d be surprised.”

An hour later, she skips lunch for the chance to catch his physical therapist (the entire Alliance has only two, and that says a lot about the state of this war that Jyn doesn’t want to consider too hard) before he goes in for his shift. The therapist, a pleasantly round Rodian male named Doctor Tinovorsh, is surprisingly eager to chat with Jyn about one of his patients. But then, he’s clearly frustrated with his overloaded schedule, and the fact that resources are so low that many Alliance soldiers in need of care simply go without.

“Yes, yes,” he tells Jyn, all bobbing blue cranial and huge glistening eyes. “The muscles are healing but slow, and sore. I have shown him many good stretches, stretches that will help, and he seems to do them. But the other treatment, no, that he refuses, although it would do him much good.”

“The other treatment?”

“Focused massage of the _quadratus lumborum_ and _gluteus medius_ , at minimum,” Tinovorsh explains. “With some lesser attention to the _trapezius, latissimus dorsi,_ and _obliques_.”

At Jyn’s blank look, he brings her into his small, cramped office and digs through a pile of datapads. “Ah, here, a copy of Krae’s Anatomy,” he announces triumphantly, pulling one from the bottom of the haphazard stack and causing the rest to waver in an alarming way.  “Volume ninety-four, Section eight, Subsection three,” the doctor recites, showing her. “Vertebrate, Bipedal, Human: Skeletal and Musculature.” Jyn scrolls through the series of diagrams and articles until she finds a series of detailed images of a human back, and Tinovorsh points over her shoulder.  “These, look, these are the muscles Captain Andor damaged, and here, ah, allow me to highlight, yes, good, thank you, Sergeant…”

Jyn hands the pad back and watches the doctor tap at the screen for a few minutes. Part of her just wants to grab the data and stride off, and if it were her own health, her own pain, that’s exactly what she would do. She can figure out how to lick her own wounds just fine. But it’s Cassian’s back, his pain, so Jyn grits her teeth and asks. “Is there a recommended…technique?”

Tinovorsh glances up at her, nodding absently. “Ah, yes, of course, of course, here, I will add on some basic methodology, yes, and some of my own findings on therapeutic utilization of pressure points, ah, _pressure points_ , you’ll need an overlay of those…”

Jyn finally escapes half an hour later, a datapad full of anatomy diagrams and what looks like long-winded medical journals about the psychological value of physical contact. She spends the next several hours sitting curled away in a relatively quiet corner of the hanger bay, scowling at the datapad in fierce concentration, until at last she thinks she might know what to do. Or at least, how to start.

Now the hard part.

It’s well into the night shift by the time Jyn makes her way through the narrow corridors of the barracks. People in various states of dress – or alertness – shuffle around her, coming and going from missions, shift changes, or the communal ‘freshers, but once she turns down the corridor for mid-level officers, the flow of people ebbs and she’s alone. Her footsteps echo slightly in the silence, and the datapad she’s still gripping suddenly feels a little slippery in her hand, but Jyn marches resolutely to the door at the end of the hall and knocks before she can lose her nerve.

Cassian opens it almost immediately.  He’s still fully dressed, which makes her glare at him. “You’ve been off duty for three hours,” she says by way of greeting.

“Yes,” Cassian agrees, lifting an eyebrow and stepping to the side to let her in.

Jyn walks in toward the center of the room and turns on her heel, crossing her arms. “You haven’t even tried to sleep yet, have you?”

“No.” He closes the door and moves carefully back towards his narrow bunk, and she’s at least pleased that he’s not trying to hide the stiffness in his back from her. Unless that means it’s just so bad tonight that he can’t even make the effort. Jyn opens her mouth to tell him he needs the rest, realizes it will be an ultimately useless gesture, and closes it again.

A comfortable silence fills the room for a few minutes as Cassian settles on the bed. Jyn knows she ought to feel uncomfortable, standing in the middle of his room with her arms crossed as he looks at her in silence. But, well, it’s Cassian. He knows she struggles sometimes to put her thoughts into words; he’s careful enough with his own not to mind when she takes her time. So for a long moment, Jyn frowns at him in contemplation while he rests his hands on his knees and watches her with the air of a man with all the time in the galaxy.

There really is no other way to do this besides the direct approach, she decides.

“Your back hurts.”

A pause, then Cassian nods slightly. “Sometimes.”

“All the time,” she snorts. “ _Sometimes_ it’s just worse.”

He makes a small movement that’s almost a shrug, except his shoulders don’t really move.

“Tinovorsh recommended stretches and massage,” she tells him, holding up the datapad.

Cassian eyes it, then frowns. “How did you know I was assigned to Tinovorsh and not Roseland?”

She shifts her weight slightly, but she’d meant to tell him sooner or later anyway, so it’s not too hard to look him in the eye as she confesses. “I stole your medical record.”

The eyebrow comes up again, and his gaze sharpens. “When?”

“The day you were released from medical with a cane and orders to stay in your bunk for the next twelve hours.” Jyn jabs an accusing finger at that very bunk, as if he needs a visual. “Which you _didn’t_.”

“Would you?” Cassian’s voice is still soft, but there’s an edge of defensiveness creeping in. She doesn’t want to put him on defense if she’s going to have any chance at talking him into her plan, so she drops her finger and switches tactics.

“Doesn’t matter. Tinovorsh says you do the stretches but don’t go in for the massage.”

“Have you seen the physical therapy space?” Cassian gestures sharply with one hand, a scowl pulling at his normally neutral expression. “It’s a large empty room, multiple entrances, and half the medical staff uses as a through-way to other parts of the med ward. The benches look like butcher’s tables, and I have to lay face down and half naked while people I can’t see walk around me and a stranger pokes at my back.”

Jyn keeps her eyes level with his, but she can’t stop her own hands from clenching a bit at the thought. She understands, she really does. That sounds less like therapy and more like torture to her, too. “Right,” she says flatly. “I’m not telling you to do it.” A little of the tension in his face smooths out at that, although his shoulders stay tight and unyielding.

Silence reigns again as Jyn stalls, fighting the slight blush she can already feel trying to creep up around her neck. She’s about to ask for a lot of trust, but damn it, she is _not_ going to be embarrassed. This is purely a means to resolving his obvious pain and discomfort. _Stop being a kriffing idiot_ , she tells herself firmly.

Cassian tilts his head at her, looking a little concerned now. Shit, he’s probably noticed the blush. Of course he has, he’s Cassian. “Jyn?” He shifts a little closer to the side of the bed and braces his hands on the edge like he’s about to push himself up and walk over to her. She doesn’t miss the way his jaw tightens as his muscles protest the motion.

“Let me do it,” she blurts out.

That stops him cold, and he stares at her, still leaning forward as if about to stand. “What?”

Jyn brandishes the datapad again. “Tinovorsh gave me diagrams, and medical journals, and a shit-ton of other junk that tells me how to do it. Some of it.” He’s still staring at her, his face gone alarmingly blank the way it does when he’s in a crowded place or around strangers. That expression makes something twist in Jyn’s guts, and she steps forward, holding the pad out like an offering, like proof. “See? And you don’t have to lie down, or do anything except just sit there and tell me if I do it wrong.” She waves a hand vaguely around at his quarters. “We’ll stay here, so no one will pass through.” _And I’m not some stranger_ , she thinks but can’t quite bring herself to say.

Now the silence between them does feel awkward, and strange. Jyn hates it, but she doesn’t know how to fix it and she’s not going to withdraw the offer – demand, really, because she’s not about to let him just hobble around in pain forever, not if there’s a single damn thing she can do about it.  Jyn reacts to the discomfort the only way she knows how. She folds her arms again, plants her feet, and glares at him.

“You…don’t have to do this,” he says at last, slowly, like he’s feeling his way through an unknown space. “If you think you…owe me this, because of Scarif,” he shakes his head. “You don’t, Jyn.”

Of course he thinks she’s here out of guilt. He’d been there when Mon Mothma and Draven came to hear her account in the medbay.  He heard her snarl whenever someone mentioned the casualties. He saw her flinch every time the doctors discussed the extensive surgeries and recovery time he would need.

But Jyn’s not a masochist, she’s not here to punish herself. “I’m tired of seeing you in pain,” she tells him, honest, defiant.

An odd expression flickers across his face then, gone before she can read it, but the hard lines of his blank mask soften a little, and he looks a little less like Captain Andor of Rebel Intelligence and much more like Cassian. “Ah,” he murmurs, and then he takes a deep breath and ducks his head. Carefully, he brings his hands together and hangs them between his knees, gaze fixed on the floor.

“What should I…what do you need me to do?”

Jyn takes a quick centering breath of her own, and then forces her movements to be as business-like as possible as she walks over to him. “Are you comfortable enough there?” She points again at the bunk, and he looks up at her through his eyelashes for a moment before nodding. Resolutely, Jyn tugs off her gloves, then reaches down to unlace her boots. She makes a point of not looking over at him as she sets them aside, and then climbs onto the bunk too. She doesn’t touch him as she situates on her knees behind him, but she does set the datapad on the thin mattress at an angle they can both see. With a quick tap, she calls up the simplest of the diagrams, labelling the muscle groups the therapist highlighted for her.

“I’ve studied these, but Tinovorsh says every human is a little different, so it would be helpful if I can see what I’m doing.” She swallows, then says briskly, “Do you mind taking off your shirt?”

His lifts his head a little at that, but doesn’t turn to look back. “Just this first time,” she adds hastily. “Next time I probably won’t need to see as clearly.”

“Next time,” he repeats casually, but he’s gripping the hem of his shirt a little harder than necessary as he pulls it over his head.

“Your primary surgeon recommended one session every other day for two weeks, then once every third day for another two weeks, once a week for a month, and then as needed for pain relief,” she recites. “No matter what the patient might think himself.”

“You _did_ steal my record,” he chuckles. “She wrote that word for word in at least three places.”

Jyn hums distractedly in response, focused on Cassian’s exposed back. It’s surprisingly unmarked, given his lifetime of service to the Alliance, with one glaring exception. “And Doctor Tinovorsh wrote it twice,” she agrees in a preoccupied tone. “It’s almost like they knew you needed to hear it more than once.”

“I think they make that assumption about most of their patients.”

He starts to say something else, she’s not sure what, but he cuts off abruptly when she sets her palms gently against the scars on his lower back. The two thick white lines, roughly ten centimeters each, mar his skin on either side of his spine. They are stark against the cast of his skin. Jyn lets her hands rest there for a moment, fighting back the sudden influx of memory – sand, smoke, blood, and the sick crack of Cassian’s body smashing into steel beams as she clung, helpless and terrified, watching him fall. He had been so still, sprawled in a heap on that cold metal platform, and her scream had frozen solid in her throat as she stared.

He’s unnaturally still now, and Jyn shakes herself a little because it’s probably her fault this time, too; she’s broadcasting her distress. “Cassian,” she commands quietly. “Breathe.”

Under her hands, his back rises and falls again as he lets out the breath he’s been holding.

Carefully, glancing occasionally at the datapad, Jyn starts to trace her fingers across his shoulders. “ _Trapezius_ ,” she mutters, learning the shape of it, of him, beneath her fingertips. She skims her hands down, feeling her way around his back, focusing on the outline of his muscles and studiously ignoring the warmth of his skin, or the slight catch in his breath. “ _Deltoid. Latissimus dorsi_.” She sketches out both sides of his upper back, then moves lower, stumbling a little over the ridiculously long words as she feels out his inner and outer obliques, traces the area the diagram calls the _thoracolumbar fascia membrane_. She pauses, her hands hovering just above his hip bones…and then bites her lip, and deliberately ignores the _gluteus medius_. It’s one thing to look at the bright red highlighted areas on an impersonal, skinless model and quite another to slide her bare hands down Cassian’s hips, even over his thick uniform trousers. Next time, she tells herself, next time, when they are both more comfortable.

Jyn sets her palms against the scars again, and mentally braces. _Push your hands upward, toward the heart,_ the doctor’s datapad had told her, _that is the direction in which the blood flows._

“Cassian,” she says quietly. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”

She waits for him to nod, then she leans a little weight onto her hands and pushes up, digging the heels of her palms over the muscles on either side of his spine, all the way up to his shoulders. When she gets there, she eases the pressure, and slides her fingertips lightly back down the same path. She pushes upwards hard and pulls downwards gently, back and forth a few more times, until the skin along his spine starts to redden a bit from the friction, and then she switches to knead at the hard knots she can feel in the middle of his back, just under his shoulder blades.  She works one side, then the other, and while Cassian’s muscles twitch and smooth out under her hands, the man himself neither moves nor makes a sound.

The silence worries her a little, because most of her reading emphasized that she should be getting feedback from him throughout the…process. But the stillness of the room has settled around them again, not as awkward as when she asked to do this but not as light and comfortable as when she first arrived. This silence seems more _intent_ , and Jyn doesn’t know how to break it, so she finishes his mid back and drops her palms to his scars again. She probably shouldn’t fixate on those scars, shouldn’t keep drawing both of their attention to them, but she can’t seem to stop, either.  It _hurts_ to see the irrevocable damage that her choices have left on someone else, someone who believed her. It hurts to think of all the others who also believed, but aren’t around to deal with their scars.

Maybe she did come here to punish herself, a little.

_Focus._

Jyn takes a deep breath, and eyes the muscles on Cassian’s back, concentrating on the shapes she’s traced out. She pushes her palms up the length of his spine again. This time when she reaches his shoulders, she digs her fingers into the knots at the base of his neck. To her shock, Cassian groans at the pressure and shudders under her hands. Instantly, she jerks back. “Shit, sorry!” Damn, damn, damn, she probably dug too hard, or pressed against the bone itself, which the medical journals stressed that she should never do.

“No,” he shakes his head, and his voice wavers over the word before he clears his throat. “No, it’s fine. I just…wasn’t ready for it.”

 _Ready for what_ , she almost asks. Instead, she tentatively brushes her fingertips against his upper back ( _deltoids_ , she thinks, because hell, she studied this stuff for hours like her life depended on it and now she’ll probably never be able to forget it). “I can stop, if you want.”

For the first time, he turns his head enough to look at her over his shoulder. Jyn clamps down on the urge to fidget, or lean back, or lean _forward_. “No,” he says at last. “Don’t.”

Jyn nods, waits until he looks away, and then presses her fingers a little harder against him, questioning.  

“Yeah,” he murmurs, and then, voice dropping so low she almost can’t hear it, he adds, “please.”

She slides her hands back up to his neck ( _scalene_ , _trapezius_ ) and – very carefully – rolls her fingers along those muscles, stopping every minute or so to check that he’s not clenching his jaw or showing some other sign that she’s hurting him. Oddly, despite that initial reaction, he seems completely relaxed, his jaw loose, his eyes closed. She hopes that he really is as calm as he appears, because if he’s putting that much effort into lying to her when the whole point is to help him, she’s going to punch him.

 She works her way back down, keeping her touch a little lighter this time because his skin is starting to redden and warm beneath her hands and she’s worried she’ll give him a friction burn. But now she’s to the point that the doctors considered most critical – his lower back. “Okay,” she returns her palms to his scars and presses a little so she has his attention. “This part may hurt no matter what I do. If it gets too much, or feels like - ah, hang on.” she leans to the side to poke at the datapad until the screen settles on the file she wants. “Stabbing sensations or microtremors in the tissue,” she reads off, then grimaces. “That sounds even worse out loud.”

“If I want you to stop, I’ll tell you,” Cassian promises, and his voice is significantly closer than she expects. Jyn’s eyes snap up, and she realizes suddenly that she’s leaning against his back to see the datapad, her chin almost resting on his shoulder. He’s turned to look at her again, and his cheek is dangerously close to her face. The urge to lean forward, press her lips against his jawline or run her hands up and around to the front of his torso almost overwhelms her, but she catches it in time and slides carefully away. _He’s been in pain every day for fucking weeks_ , she reminds herself savagely. _You can be a moon brained dreamer later._

“Okay,” she says, sliding her hands outwards from the scars and pressing her thumbs gently on either side of them. “Breathe.”

She digs her thumbs in gently, working small, slow circles into the muscles. Cassian exhales a sudden, shaky breath, but he doesn’t say anything so Jyn doesn’t stop. Slowly, methodically, she keeps up the circular pressure, working her way out from his spine towards his sides, and then back in, letting her fingers skim lightly over his skin but keeping even pressure with her thumbs. Her own patience surprises her a little. Jyn is many things, but _patient_ has never really been one of them. She doesn’t feel even marginally tempted to rush this, however, noting how he leans forward a little further, granting her a better angle, more access to his body. The idea that he might actually be enjoying this, she acknowledges only deep down in the quietest part of her soul, is a little bit thrilling.

She repeats the circular path twice more, moving a little lower on his back each time, until her hands are once more resting on the skin just about his belt. Once more she pauses, considers, but the quiet in the room has become almost comfortable again, and Cassian seems as relaxed and pain-free as she’s seen him in…well, ever. It’s just the wrong time to try it, she decides, firmly setting aside the temptation to run her fingers around to his hips and dig into the muscles there. She’s covered about eighty percent of the places her medical journals highlighted. That should be enough for the first attempt.

Of course, now that she’s finished, Jyn finds herself at a bit of a loss. It had been strange and awkward enough to start, now how is she supposed to _stop_? Just drop her hands, hop off the bed, grab her boots and run for the door? Thank him for letting her help? Maybe give him a little pat on the shoulder and tell him good job? Jyn doesn’t have a lot of experience with therapy in general, much less anything near so intimate as this.

To cover her uncertainty, Jyn runs her hands lightly up and down his spine a few times, smoothing her palms over his skin as if trying to wipe away her own touch. Cassian’s head is still bent, his elbows propped on his knees, and she can only just see the hard line of his jaw over the flex of his shoulder.  He’s really unfairly attractive, she decides, even from this angle.  And she still can’t quite get over how few scars he has, at least that she can see. There’s a small, almost hair-thin mark on his neck just behind his left ear, and what she thinks might be a faded burn mark on the inside of his right arm, but otherwise he seems entirely unscathed by a lifetime of fighting a war. Of course, there are still the heavy white surgical scars on his spine.

Jyn notices idly that she’s reverted to tracing her fingertips around the lines of his muscles, mapping him. She ghosts her fingers back up to his shoulders and rests them there, because this seems as good a stopping point as any other. And she’s _glad_ he doesn’t have more scars. It means he’s good at what he does, good at surviving, good at getting the job done. He’s good at fighting this desperate war, even when he goes off-script and follows some crazy thief on a suicide mission because she insisted that her estranged father said it might save the galaxy.

“Cassian,” she says softly, barely above a whisper.

He hums indistinctly in response, not moving.

“Thank you,” she breathes, and before he can answer, Jyn leans forward and presses a soft kiss to his spine, just at the base of his neck.

Faintly, in the tiny part of her mind that is currently willing to think more than three seconds ahead, she expects him to jerk away, or turn around and confront her, or really to do anything other than what he actually does.

Cassian’s chest heaves like he’s been holding his breath for hours, for years, and he almost falls back towards her. Reflexively, Jyn tightens her grip on his shoulders, catching and balancing him. She lets her own head drop, rests her forehead against the curve of his neck, and for a long moment, they are both still.

Eventually, she sits back up, slides her hands off his skin. “Better?” Jyn asks, mouth just a little dry.

Slowly, Cassian straightens his spine and sits all the way up. Then he twists, one way and then the other, and rolls his shoulders experimentally. “Yes.”

“Don’t lie,” she snaps automatically, ordering herself not to stare.

Cassian’s face flashes with an emotion she can’t catch before he’s tucked it away again. “Yes, it really is better.” He turns to face her as she briskly moves to the edge of the bed next to him and starts to tug on her boots, looking determinedly at her feet and nothing else.

“Jyn,” Cassian leans a little closer, dipping his head to catch her eye. Jyn knots her bootlaces and glances at him from the side of her eye. “Thank you.”

She nods, all capacity for speech gone. If she opens her mouth now, she’ll have to turn and look at him, and he’s too close now. She isn’t really sure what she’ll do. She isn’t really sure what she wants to do.

Her hands are still warm from his skin.

She stands up, crosses to the door, stop abruptly, and turns sharply on her heel. Cassian is still sitting where she left him, shirtless, staring at her. Jyn marches back towards him and leans down to snatch the datapad still sitting next to his hip.

Jyn prides herself on her quick reaction times, but Cassian is so fast that she doesn’t even see him move. His hand is just suddenly wrapped around her wrist.  He tugs so lightly that she should barely have felt it, but instead she staggers and almost falls, dropping the datapad and throwing her hands out instinctively. This time she braces against his shoulders to balance herself, both from the fall and from the sudden sweet shock of Cassian’s lips against her cheek.

He doesn’t linger, she feels just the slight pressure of his mouth and the faint scratch of his beard, and then he uses her captured wrist to leverage her back upright. “I’m not lying,” he says in a low, rough voice. “Not to you.”

Jyn stares at him, flushed and off balance. “Okay,” she manages. “Good.”

 _Next time_ , Jyn tells herself as she finally forces herself out the door and into the cool air of the corridor, next time she won’t be a coward. Next time, Cassian’s honesty won’t be so surprising.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Five thousand words about intimate physical contact and almost nothing happens. I am the least racy writer ever.


	2. though i know not where i step

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassian makes a silent, reckless promise to himself, and to her. He does not, will never again, lie to Jyn. Of course, at the time he mostly expects to die within the next day or two, so it doesn’t seem all that reckless an oath.
> 
> But then he wakes up in a medical ward with Jyn’s fingers woven tightly around his, and “never again” seems like a much longer time than he anticipated. 
> 
> Or: Physical Therapy, Round Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is actually set just before "we live in cities (you'll never see on screen)" because chronological order is overrated.
> 
> As always, my Spanish is rusty and I welcome all corrections and suggestions.

Cassian, of course, is a liar.

He’s been a liar since he was six years old, and running carefully memorized coded messages for Separatists through Republic checkpoints. He has lied so many times and as so many different people that occasionally he has to pause and sort through which lie belongs to which persona. However, Cassian is very careful about lying to himself. A spy must know his own tells (Does he flush red when he’s angry? Does he fidget when he’s tired? Does he flinch when he’s hurt?), or they will betray him at critical moments.  It isn’t easy to train certain reactions out of himself, so he considers it simply good practice to keep them under control at all times, even in the relative safety of the Rebel bases. Cassian worked for years to perfect what another intelligence operative once called his “Resting Bored Face,” and by this point in his life it’s actually harder to show emotion than it is to simply don that comfortable mask. Lies, Cassian has long since known, are mostly easier than truth, and always safer. So Cassian lies to everyone as a matter of course.

Or at least, he used to.

Now, of course, there is Jyn. Cassian lies to Jyn exactly once in their (surprisingly brief) relationship, and even months later the fallout of that decision still twists into a hard knot in his gut when he thinks about it. Somewhere between hearing her throw his own words at the Council in a bid to drive them to Scarif and offering her a squad of the best, most desperate operatives he could scrounge in an hour, Cassian makes a silent, reckless promise to himself, and to her. He does not, will never again, lie to Jyn. Of course, at the time he mostly expects to die within the next day or two, so it doesn’t seem all that reckless an oath.

But then he wakes up in a medical ward with Jyn’s fingers woven tightly around his, and “never again” seems like a much longer time than he anticipated.

He expects that promise will bite him eventually, but so far it’s been almost shockingly easy to keep. Jyn doesn’t push for information he can’t or doesn’t want to give. She listens quietly when he randomly tells some halting story about his life, about his family, about himself. Only once does she ask about a past mission of his, and when he very carefully says, “It was a classified operation,” she simply nods and changes the subject.

He probably loves her. At least, he thinks he does, he thinks that’s the name for it, though he can barely begin to describe it even to himself. It’s a heady, confusing rush of desire and hope and fear that sometimes crashes through his veins like a storm and sometimes wraps around his chest as comfortable and familiar as his old blue parka. It’s the brief flush of pride when she smiles at some dry joke he’s told, the sick drop in his gut when some _cabr_ _ón_ takes a swing at her _,_ the slow fire under his skin when she brushes too close or holds his gaze too long. It’s the easy way he catches himself thinking _I should show this to Jyn_ or _Jyn would probably like that_ or even _I wonder what Jyn would think right now?_  It’s a desperate need to grab her and kiss her senseless at war with the equally desperate need to give her space and time to decide if she wants to stay without any pressure from him.

Cassian hasn’t loved a lot of people in his life, and none of them like this, so naturally it both exhilarates him and scares the _hell_ out of him.

And he has no idea how to tell her any of it.

(Sometimes, when he wakes up in the dead of the night with his skin on fire and his groin tight and aching, Jyn’s green eyes and sharp-edged smile lingering behind his eyelids, he thinks he should just open his damn mouth and tell her the truth. _Jyn, I think I love you and I want you in my life until the day I die, please, stay with me and I’m yours in every way you’ll have me._ Sometimes, when he wakes up in the dead of night with the sick stench of blood in his nose and the harsh bite of bile on his tongue and the blank, accusing eyes of people he has murdered lingering behind his eyelids, he thinks he should just kneel at her feet and tell her the truth. _Jyn, I turned myself into a monster for the sake of a cause I sometimes forget to believe in, please, forgive me when I make a mess of this, too._ )

Cassian is adrift in uncharted hyperlanes, so he does the only thing that seems even remotely feasible. He waits for Jyn to tell him what she wants.

So far, what she wants seems to be a reliable partner and truly impressive number of personal weapons.

The first is easy, the second requires some favors for the quartermaster and a few messages sent off to some old smuggling contacts.

Other than that, he’s fairly sure he’s handling everything else all wrong, and in the stretches of time where he’s given some mission without Jyn at his side, or the even less frequent times that Command actually sends her somewhere without him, Cassian frets about it. That’s what Kay calls it, anyway, whenever he catches Cassian checking the incoming passenger manifests for Jyn’s name for the tenth time or cleans the newest bladed weapon he’s secured from the quartermaster’s sympathetic assistant. The young female Twi’lek is particularly enamored with exotic blades, which makes it easy to convince her to spend her free time digging around for something like the chakram. “Needlessly fretting again, I see,” Kay scoffs as Cassian carefully inspects the rounded double blade. “You have seen Jyn’s Operative scoring boards. You know she is qualified to handle this low-risk objective without squandering extra resources.”

“It isn’t about qualifications,” Cassian protests, making sure that the groove where the two chakram blade halves meet lines up perfectly. If it doesn’t, the Twi’lek assistant informed him, the blades could catch or stick to one another, rendering them much less effective. Cassian’s never fought with chakram himself, but Jyn speaks fondly of the set she once used as a child.

“Your concern is unquantified, and that weapon is archaic,” Kay tells him huffily, and stomps off to harass some new mechanic recruit in the droid bay. Cassian doesn’t know the full story, but he finds it odd that Kay no longer seems to fear going to the droid bay without Cassian as back up. He thinks it might have to do with how one of the duty ensigns is apparently terrified of Jyn. Ensign Rorik has a strongly-worded standing order that K2SO is not to be touched unless given explicit permission from Captain Andor or Sergeant Erso, and Cassian was off base when that order was issued. He makes a mental note to ask her about it soon.

Maybe he’ll ask tonight, if she comes.

Cassian’s stomach tightens a little at the thought, anticipation mixed with uncertainty mixed with a smoldering heat. 

Jyn blames herself for Cassian’s injuries on Scarif, and worse, for his slow and painful recovery. She isn’t to blame, of course, nothing is except the Empire, gravity, and Cassian’s own stubborn need to stay busy. Nonetheless, Cassian has not missed the way her jaw tightens when he flinches or stumbles, nor has he been able to hide the limp from her sharp eyes (though he tries, because he hates the helpless rage that carves lines into her face when she sees it). What he _did_ miss, apparently, was the moment she decided to do something about it. So it came as something of a shock to him when, two days ago, Jyn stalked into his room with a datapad full of medical jargon and body diagrams, informed him that she’d not only stolen his medical records but also consulted with his doctors, and then all but demanded that he let her…well, massage him.

 _Mierda._ It sounds dirty when he thinks about it like that (not nearly as dirty as he wants, but that’s another problem all together).

Cassian sat on his military-issue cot and stared at his partner while she outlined the ways she planned to rub her hands on his bare skin, and knew that if ever there was a moment to tell her either of the two truths he owes her ( _I want you to stay, I’ll drive you away_ ), this was it. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and his hands clenched between his knees. And when she finally let him breathe again, he kissed her cheek like a brother (not like a brother, not at all) and now he has no fucking idea what to do when she comes back.

If she comes back. She said _next time_ like a promise, but that was before he lost his fool mind and nearly yanked her into his lap.

So now he sits here, alone in his quarters, fiddling with the strange Twi’lek blade he bartered to acquire just because he thought she might like it, and tells himself he’s not waiting for Jyn. If he’s waiting, and she doesn’t come, then some part of him will take it as a sign that she isn’t interested in anything except a fellow operative, someone who can help her accomplish the objective, someone who will fight the Empire with her and maybe keep her alive long enough to see what a galaxy at peace might look like.

If he’s waiting for her and she comes…well, it probably only means she wants a partner who can kriffing walk without limping. He’s overthinking it, he always does.

Cassian slaps the chakram down on top of the small standard-issue footlocker by his bed and rakes his fingers through his hair. _You are a pathetic, needy son of a murra-goat, Cassian Andor_ , he scoffs at himself. _Is it not enough that she chooses to fight with you? Is it not enough that she cares for your pain?_ Two months ago, he would have been stunned if anyone in the whole of the Alliance (aside from Kay) thought of him as anything other than an asset in the fight. Two months ago, he could list the number of people who even knew his real name on one hand. Now he has Kay, and Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi – all of whom go out of their way to find him, talk to him, eat with him, just be around him -  like he matters, like he’s a friend. Now he has Jyn, and that’s more than he ever dared to dream of having, even when he was younger and less experienced, when he believed he would live to see the end of the war. He has Jyn, as a friend and a partner, and that should be enough. It is enough. It _is_.

He’s just a selfish bastard, and he wants more.

Jyn is knocking at his door. He knows it’s her, because it’s two hours past the shift change, when anyone on day shift has long gone to sleep and anyone on night shift is busy with their duties. Intelligence operatives don’t work on the standard shifts, so they alone might be wandering around base visiting one another, but there’s only one intelligence operative who would come to Cassian’s door instead of calling on his comm.

That, and no one else knocks quite like Jyn does – it’s less a polite request and more a cursory warning because she’s coming in whether he likes it or not.

Cassian takes a deep breath, locks his features down into something like neutral, and opens the door.

“You should be asleep,” Jyn greets him, stomping into the room.

Cassian can already feel the smile pulling his dispassionate mask out of shape. Less than three seconds to break him, he thinks idly. It’s almost a new record. “Should I?”

She stops in the middle of his small quarters for a moment, looks around like she’s considering, and then sits carefully on his footlocker, avoiding the blade he’s left on it. Her eyes flicker over the chakram with interest, but then she turns to look him up and down, assessing. “Are you not sleeping because your back hurts?”

Cassian shuts his door and tries not to look nervous as he sits on the edge of his bed, within arm’s reach of her. He’s spent his life approaching everything from an angle, every conversation a sort of chess game rigged with traps and dead ends. Talking with Jyn is a bit like someone suddenly sweeping the board clean and declaring that all the rules are now meaningless. Despite himself, Cassian can feel his shoulders relaxing, his mouth softening. “Not really.”

She frowns at him, piercing eyes scanning over his face. Cassian wonders if she’s looking for the lie, and feels a little pang of sadness that she still doesn’t quite trust him, that he still hasn’t quite earned it back after Eadu. “It does hurt,” she declares, tone leaving no room for argument. “Bodhi says you were moving slow in the mess hall tonight.” She shakes her head a little at Cassian’s raised eyebrow. “You do that when you’re trying to hide the limp. Yes, I asked Bodhi to check on you and no, he didn’t imagine it. We all know you’re still hurting,” she digs at her belt and unfolds her datapad, not meeting Cassian’s eyes as he absorbs that information. “You might as well stop trying to deny it.”

Cassian leans forward and props his elbows on his knees. He doesn’t really need to ask, but he does anyway, because some small, pathetic part of him loves hearing it. “Who is _we_?”

“Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze, Kay,” Jyn recites as if it’s obvious, because it is. “And me,” she adds after a beat.  

Cassian nods. How else can he respond?

Jyn shifts her weight, glances at the datapad and then back at him, and then abruptly stands back up. “Every other day for two weeks,” she says, crossing her arms and planting her feet like she’s issuing a challenge to the world.

Cassian feels the smile tugging at his lips again. There is something so endearing about Jyn’s way of dealing with awkward moments, how she just bulldozes her way through them until they give up and stop being awkward. He thinks that Jyn would punch Awkwardness in the face, if that were possible. He leans back a little to look up at her (she’s standing closer than he thought, so he has to tilt his head further than expected to avoid staring directly at her chest), and lets the smile pull one corner of his mouth up. “An order, Sergeant?” he asks teasingly.

Jyn gives him a Look and points at his chest with the datapad. “An offer, _Captain_ ,” she replies with mock gravity. “A little pain now or a lot later?” She tilts her head and now the challenge is for him.

“You make it sound like this is going to hurt,” Cassian pushes himself back slightly on the bed, gesturing for her to follow.

“It might.” Jyn kicks off her boots and pulls off her fraying gloves (he needs to pick up some new ones before those dissolve right off her fingers) and climbs onto the bed, crawling on her knees until she’s behind him.

“It didn’t last time.”

“Didn’t it?” There’s so much genuine surprise in her voice that Cassian turns to look back at her over his shoulder, ignoring the spike of pain the movement twists through his lower back.

“No, Jyn, it didn’t. Why do you think…?” _Because you said it felt good and she thinks you’re a liar_ , he answers himself darkly, but he keeps that thought quiet.

“You made that sound,” she replies, staring at him, “when I was here,” she touches her fingertips lightly to the nape of his neck, and Cassian turns around hurriedly, so she can’t see his face. _Ah. That_. She’d dug her clever fingers into his neck without warning, and somehow managed to hit a sweet spot that sent a bolt of pure pleasure down the entire length of his spine. Cassian, wholly unprepared for the sensation, had groaned aloud. Of course, Jyn had taken that as a sign that she’d hurt him, and he’s been too temporarily incoherent to correct her.

“I promised I would stop you, if it hurt,” he says now, staring hard at the wall opposite his bunk and forcing himself to exhale slowly, three, four, five. Inhale, two, three, four, exhale. He glances back at her just long enough to make eye contact and say, “I will, Jyn.” Then it’s back to the wall, inhale, two, three, four.

He feels Jyn set her calloused hands against his shoulder blades, run them gently down until her palms are resting over the surgical scars on his lower back. Of course she’s fixated on those scars; in her mind they are a symbol of everything she considers to be her fault. Cassian contemplates turning around again and trying once again to convince her that she cannot take the blame for every terrible thing the Empire has inflicted on them.

“Cassian,” Jyn says in a strangled voice before he’s even completed the thought. He waits, listening, but she only slides her hands up until they are flat against his shoulder blades again, breathes in, two, three, four, and out, two, three, four… Cassian realizes he’s matching his breathing to hers, or maybe the other way around. Jyn leans against her hands, pressing into his back, and says in an almost normal voice, “can I take off your shirt?”

Cassian bites down on the little thrill in his chest. He nods, not trusting his own voice to stay level, and reaches to comply. To his mild surprise, Jyn’s already pulling up the hem, helping him tug the worn fabric up over his head and dropping it into his lap. Absently, he folds it neatly and reaches to push open his footlocker. He almost forgets the chakram sitting on the lid, until Jyn’s hand flashes out from behind him and snags it neatly before it can clatter to the floor.

“That’s for you,” he remembers at last to tell her, tossing his folded shirt lightly on the pile of his meager possessions in the trunk and swinging the lid back down.

“Where did you get a kriffing chakram?” Jyn’s weight settles back on the mattress behind him for a moment, her attention obviously focused on the weapon. He hears the soft _snickt_ of the blades coming apart, and the appreciative little hum Jyn makes soothes down every raw nerve he’s been fighting to conceal. Whatever else happens, he thinks, whatever else he should or should not say to her, she’s still going to be his blade-loving, brawling partner. She’s unsociable but kind, blunt but honest, unpredictable but never untrustworthy.

He probably loves her, even if he can’t keep her.

“I know a guy,” he jokes lightly, looking down at his hands and slowly unclenching them until they hang loosely between his knees. Behind him, Jyn chuckles softly, and clicks the blades back together. He lets his neck relax, dropping his chin against his chest and closing his eyes. He listens to the rustle of cloth and feels the bed shift around as Jyn stows the chakram somewhere in her clothes, and for the first time all day feels some of the tension in his aching back ease away.

“Okay,” Jyn says at last, and her voice sounds calmer now, too, like they’ve somehow pushed through the worst of the awkwardness and can now just be themselves again. “I’m going to do exactly what I did last time. But this time, try to give me feedback, alright?”

“Feedback,” Cassian smirks at his hands and says, almost meditatively, “last time I did that, you thought I was dying.”

Jyn snorts and pokes his shoulder. “You sounded like you were dying. Try _words,_ Cassian.”

“Hmm,” he agrees placidly, which earns him another hard poke before she settles her hands on his shoulder blades again.

He’s ready for it, this time, when she pushes her palms up his back, rolling the muscles along his spine slowly. He can control the shivers that her fingers provoke, when she traces light patterns around the edges of his muscle groups, whispering their names under her breath. He even swallows back the groan when she digs the tips of her fingers into that devastatingly sweet spot on the nape of his neck, and rides out the warmth that rolls down his spine without arching into it like a lothal-cat. He can’t control the small ticks and twitches of his various individual muscles as she kneads the hard knots out of them; those are all completely involuntary. They give away nothing except that it’s working, she’s working, digging her hands in to his muscles and squeezing the pain out like poison from a wound. He can already feel the ache in his lower back fading even before she leans her weight against her thumbs and works them in spirals out from his scars. It’s even easier to breathe without faint pain in his ribcage, something he hadn’t really noticed until it was gone.

He really should just tell her. _I love you. You make me so happy. I want you to be happy, but I am afraid that I can’t give you that._ It might just be that easy. It might just rip out his heart.

“There’s a big knot here,” Jyn murmurs, tapping her fingers on a sore spot on his left shoulder. “I’m going to push harder. Tell me to stop when you want, Cassian.”

Once, Cassian read a book of old poems from some long-dead famous Alderaanian poet, more out of a sense of duty coupled with a long, boring flight rather than any real interest. He retained very little of it, but he remembers a line from one particular poem. It was addressed to a woman, and seemed ironically to be a long list of reasons why the author could not address her, how the words always got lost somewhere in the place between his mind and his mouth. _Las palabras son puentes_ , he wrote _, tambi_ _én son trampas, jaulas, pozos_ , and even then, nineteen and alone in the galaxy as he rode some public transport shuttle to some crowded, Imperial-controlled city under some fake name he would forget an hour after he dropped it, even then, Cassian had understood that feeling.

 _I want so badly to talk to you_ , he thinks as Jyn rears up behind him on her knees to get better leverage, pushing down on knots where his neck curves into his shoulders until the soreness dissipates and he can roll his head without wincing. _I want to tell you the truth, but the same words that could reach you might also drive you away._

Jyn settles back on her heels, the shift in the mattress tugging at Cassian’s balance, gently tempting him to lean back and rest against her. He doesn’t, of course, because neither of them are ready to deal with that right now. But for the first time, he thinks about it without guilt, and that’s something.

Jyn’s hands slide back to the scars on his lower back, rest there a moment. “Cassian,” she says softly, “There’s, ah, something else.”

Her voice drags him out of his stupor, and he blinks and sits up straight again, rolling his shoulders just to enjoy the sensation of doing it without little needles of pain pricking up and down his neck. He turns and looks over his shoulder at Jyn, surprised to see that she’s picked up the datapad again and is holding it out to him. “Here,” she says, almost shoving it in his face.

Cassian takes the datapad, and the screen fills with the clinical diagrams of a human back, skin peeled away and various muscles highlighted in bright primary colors. Jyn shifts to sit beside him on the bed, her shoulder slanting against his, and Cassian wills his ridiculous body to stop behaving like a teenager going through puberty. “This is why Doctor Tinovorsh thinks you still limp. It’s not your leg, it’s your hip.”

Her voice has taken on a particularly fierce note, like she’s gearing up for an argument, and Cassian wonders why until he finally rips his eyes away from her bent head and really looks at the screen. The muscle under Jyn’s fingertip is lit up bright red, and Cassian goes still as he realizes that it starts just under the dimple on his lower back and curves around his hip to his upper thigh.

“I left it alone last time,” Jyn tells him bluntly, clearly trying to sound professional and mostly just sounding irritated. “I figured that might be asking too much. But you’re still limping and this is a big part of why, Cassian.”

Apparently, rubbing his back isn’t enough; now Jyn wants to dig her fingers into his hips, his thighs, and his ass. The realization burns right through the last tendrils of the pleasant fog her hands have lulled him into, and Cassian feels his skin start to heat up again, the awkward tension from earlier seeping back into the air between them.

He looks at Jyn carefully from the corner of his eye, but she’s not looking at him, she’s glaring at the graphic on the screen like the skinless model is somehow at fault. Her jaw is set in a stubborn line, her eyes are narrow and sharp as knives, and there’s a definite pink flush to her cheek that he hasn’t seen before. As he watches, she flicks a quick glance at him through her eyelashes, then bites her lower lip in a slight grimace, flustered and frustrated but refusing to run from it.

She is impossibly lovely, and there is no way he’s going to get through this without embarrassing himself.

“Jyn,” he starts, and is almost proud of how level his voice comes out. Of course, when she turns to meet his gaze square on, he promptly forgets whatever the hell he was going to say next. Whatever she sees on his face, though, wipes the scowl off hers.

“Hey,” she says, turning on the bed to face him. “It’s okay, Cassian, you don’t have to say yes. I get it, I do,” she reaches out a tentative hand and rests it featherlight against his cheek, and there is a gratifying sort of knowledge in her eyes, like she can see right through his skin and into the riot of his thoughts. “I’m asking you for a lot of trust,” Jyn says softly, “And you don’t owe me shit, okay?” She laughs a little, her thumb caressing his cheekbone, and Cassian wants to close his eyes and turn his face into her palm.

The truth, he thinks, he owes her the truth.

Jyn closes her eyes and bows her head, her hand still against his cheek, and she sighs. “I just want you to be okay,” she confesses just above a whisper, like it’s a secret she’s embarrassed to share. She swallows, and before he can respond she starts talking again, a little louder and faster, like she’s rushing to get through a rehearsed speech before she forgets it. “I know you don’t like to be touched, so this is a lot to ask, but I’d really like to get this right, and I’ll be as, um, professional as I can, Cassian, I promise. If it gets too…kriff, too _personal_ , too much, you can just say it and I’ll stop, alright?”

There’s a lot to parse in that, the analytical part of Cassian’s brain notes, but the rest of him latches incredulously on to the one thing he knows isn’t true at all. “I don’t like to be touched?”

Her head snaps up and she stares at him, looking just as surprised and puzzled as he feels. “You don’t,” she replies, and then blinks and pulls her hand away from his cheek like she’s only just realized it’s there. “I thought you didn’t.” At his questioning look, she holds up her hands in semi-surrender. “You never shake anyone’s hand or thump them on the shoulder,” she says matter-of-factly. “Even though that seems like a common greeting here. You don’t let anyone brush up against you in the mess hall or the corridors unless you have no choice. You get really tense in crowds,” she shrugs, “Don’t blame you, but still. And you don’t let people stand in your personal space if you can help it. Except-” She looks down at her lap suddenly, and her voice turns dismissive, almost brusque, “you know, except me.”

 _Here_ , Cassian thinks. _Here is where I tell her the truth._

“I don’t like to be touched by _strangers_ ,” he says gently, and it’s the truth but not _the_ truth he means to tell her. Mentally, he curses himself for a coward.

For some reason, Jyn’s face twists into a sharp-edged smirk before she smooths it out again. “And I’m not just some stranger, huh?”

“No,” he agrees firmly, because she’s anything but.

Jyn stares hard at her hands, then raises her chin at him. “Offer still stands, Captain.”

Cassian meets her eyes. “Yes.”  When Jyn’s eyes widen slightly in shock, he manages a dry half-smile. “Anything to stop limping.”

“Right,” she frowns at him. “I’m definitely tired of watching you try to hide that.”

“I’m definitely tired of watching you blame yourself for it,” he shoots right back, and almost laughs at how taken aback – and mildly offended - she looks. Like rolling up a news-scrip and hitting a lothal-cat on the nose, he thinks. And if he’s not careful, he’s just as likely to get clawed for his trouble.

“Right,” Jyn says again, almost a growl this time, and shuffles back behind him on the bed.

“Do you need me to lie down?” he asks quietly, because if he’s damned anyway he might as well commit to it.

A pause, then in a slightly strained voice Jyn grunts a quick “no,” and places her hands back on his scars. “Tell me if you-”

“Want to stop, I know. It’s okay, Jyn.”

She takes another long breath in, and this time Cassian deliberately matches his breathing to hers, because it helps. Then he fixes his eyes back on the empty wall across from his bed and braces himself for the feel of Jyn’s hands sliding down to his hips.

She doesn’t give him time to think about, mercifully, just pokes at his hip bones with her thumbs like she’s anchoring herself off them, says “gluteus medium” under her breath, and digs her fingers in, hard.

Sharp pain skewers through his left hip and up into his lower back and Cassian grunts and flinches against it. Jyn’s hands stop immediately, but she doesn’t jerk away this time. Instead, she says, “breathe, Cassian,” and loudly takes a slow, deep breath. She noticed him matching her, it seems, and now she’s using it against him. No, using it to help him, he reminds himself, forcing himself to breathe in time with her. Exhale, two, three, four, five, inhale, two, three…

“Again, okay?”

He nods, focuses on her breathing, and this time the pain that shoots up through his hip is slightly duller. She stops, breathes with him for a long moment, then again. Again. Again.

Slowly she blunts the pain down until it’s more of a distant ache than a knife blade in his side. Slowly she pushes at the sore spot on his lower back, pressing down in a line with her knuckles down past his belt to where his weight rests against the bed. Her movements are slow and steady, almost rhythmic, but if he pays too much attention to that he will lose the tenuous grip on his self-control. Instead, he listens to her breathing, and focuses on the uncoiling tension in his hip.

Gradually, she eases the pressure on his muscles, although she’s still leaning most of her weight against his back for balance as she slides her knuckles down the curve of the muscle. He stretches his left leg out tentatively as she drags her fingers up his hip and around to his lower back, then down again. His whole left side feels battered and sore, but now it’s more like the rest of his back, the kind of sore that means he’ll actually sleep tonight and won’t wake up feeling like someone has locked his neck into a vise. His leg is shaking slightly, which is a little odd. That might be an effect of the sudden lack of tension, or it might simply be an effect of having Jyn pressed so intimately against him.

 _Damn it to hell_ , he was doing such a good job of not noticing that.

“Are you alright?” Her mouth is almost right next to his ear, her breath warm against his skin, and Cassian needs to either tell her the truth or ask her to stop, right now.

“Yes. Thanks,” he says, and then closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I’m glad you agreed to be my partner,” he forces out, and that isn’t exactly it, but it’s a good start. He hunts for the right words to tell her the rest, but she slides her hands up to his shoulders and leans away from him.

“Like I would have chosen anyone else,” she snorts derisively, and that both warms and worries him.

“You could have,” he says simply, and because it is almost what he was going to say anyway, he adds, “You still could.”

Jyn is silent behind him, mulling this over, and Cassian looks down at his hands again and tries to count his breaths.

“No,” she says sharply.

He waits for a moment, but she does not elaborate. “Jyn - ”

“ _No_.” Abruptly, she swings out of the bed and rams her feet into her boots. He studies the angry lines of her face and wants to smack himself, because of course he said it wrong. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? She looks up, catches him staring, glowers at him. “Are you telling me that you don’t want to be my partner?”

“Never,” he replies immediately, because anything else would be a lie. Her hurt scowl relaxes into something merely irritable, and he can’t help but add, “I just worry that you would be-”

She raises an unimpressed eyebrow at him and cuts him off, her voice nearly as sharp as her eyes. “What, Cassian?” She drops to one knee in front of him, balancing her hands against his thighs and leaning until she’s almost right in his face, glare so fierce it could blind him. “I would be what? Safer? Stronger? A better fighter? What do you think I would be, Cassian, without you?”

“Happier.”

Jyn lets out a long, tired sigh, and then closes her eyes and presses her forehead against his. “You’re an idiot,” she says flatly.

“Yes,” Cassian whispers.

“Don’t ask me to leave again,” she warns. “Unless you mean it.”

He nods slightly, throat tight.

“Okay,” she says. “You need to sleep. We’ve got a long trip tomorrow.”

Ord Mantell, he thinks. A pick-up operation with an old contact of his. Should be a simple mission, especially since they’re bringing Bodhi along. “Early start,” he agrees softly, not wanting her to pull away, not sure how to make her stay.

“If you’re limping,” she says bluntly, “I’m going to drag you to medical by your ear.”

He almost laughs a little, but she’s still leaning against him and he’s enjoying that too much to risk it. “That would be something to see.”

“If you fight me, I’ll tell Kay you are operating under peak efficiency,” she threatens, and he opens his eyes just enough to see the slight smile on her face. “Then I won’t have to drag you; he'll carry you like a sack of ration bars.”

“You wouldn’t sell me out to Kay.”

“Hm, no. But I absolutely would tell Bodhi that you were in pain and being stubborn about it.”

“And?”

“And then,” he can actually feel her grinning now, and the loose, light feeling in his back is nothing next to the loose, light feeling in his chest. “Bodhi will look at you very, very sadly.”

“Fiend,” he mutters, and she laughs.

Cassian loves her, and he has no idea how to build on that, but he’s starting to think that the first truth matters more than the second.

“Yes,” Jyn breathes against his cheek. “Definitely.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line Cassian remembers is from the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, from "Carta De Creencia," and translates to roughly: "Words are bridges / and they are traps, jails, wells" and really it's a lovely poem, even if you have to google-translate it. I chose to call his language "Alderaanian" not "Festian" because I really like the popular headcanon that Alderaanian is like Space!spanish, and has spread throughout the galaxy in several different dialects. I equate Alderaan to Spain and Fest to Mexico, in that case, and tried to keep Cassian's thoughts/words region-appropriate (like using local cuss words or colloquiums), but I am no expert and may have messed it up. I'm always happy to learn, though, so feel free to tell me what you think about star wars languages. 
> 
> The chapter title is a lyrics from White Apple Tree's "Snowflakes." ("Though I know not where I step / I'll follow you until the death"). Also a lovely song.
> 
> Cassian's POV is hard, guys.


	3. feeling like I know the words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth, Jyn knows, is a kriffing _bitch._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this took forever. And once again, my complete lack of timeline awareness means that this chapter is set AFTER ["we live in cities (you'll never see on screen)"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11572989) and AFTER ["the heart is hard to translate,"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11812290) even though the first two chapters were set BEFORE either of those stories. I tried to make it unnecessary to read either of those before this chapter, but I'm not sure I succeeded. 
> 
> Someday, I will figure out how to sort that nonsense out (it's the _themes_ yo, I have to keep the _themes_ together). In the meantime...here. 
> 
> This chapter is dedicated to [rinsantago](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rinsantago/pseuds/rinsantago) and [aewgliriel](http://archiveofourown.org/users/aewgliriel/pseuds/aewgliriel) \- they'll know why when they see it.

Jyn strides through Home I and tells herself that it’s time to muscle up and face the truth. It’s not something she tells herself very often; lies have been Jyn’s weapon and protection for a long time.  Lies are comforting, lies are safe. Lies are how she survives.

But Jyn hasn’t made it this far for this long without learning that lies can also, sometimes, be a trap. They can distort her grasp of reality, make her take chances she shouldn’t have taken, ignore warnings she should have heeded. If she lies to herself about the wrong thing long enough, eventually she turns a corner and runs head-first into the cold, hard truth.

For example, her father’s survival – a truth she ignored until it grabbed her by the throat and slammed her into the ground.

The truth, Jyn knows, is a kriffing _bitch_.

But it’s not her father that Jyn’s contemplating as she shoves through a chattering crowd of X-wing pilots and skirts two arguing droids ( _do_ droids argue between themselves? she’s never thought to ask), and it’s not her father that’s making her normal wary expression deepen into a stormy scowl. No, Jyn Erso has already faced the truth about her father ( _my father is alive, my father left me, my father is a traitor, my father is a hero_ ) a while ago, and nearly died doing it. Today, she’s dealing with the fallout of yet another harsh revelation.

Cassian doesn’t want her.

Oh, he wants her as a partner, definitely, and for good reason too. She’s smart, skilled, experienced, tough, and at this point, proven loyal. She knows that he trusts her to have his back, always. He might even want her as a friend, although that feels somewhat more tenuous than ‘partner.’ Probably because neither of them have much experience in friendship, _real_ friendship. In fact, Jyn thinks as she ducks under the half-dismantled wing of a fighter craft and around the busy maintenance crew, she can kind of blame her lack of friendships for the ugliness of her current situation.

There had been a moment, safe and quiet and alone, where Jyn had thought Cassian did want her, that he did want to make something more of the friendship between them. She’d made dirty jokes to make him laugh, and he’d kissed her – no peck on the cheek but a real, deep, toe-curling kiss – but the moment something had distracted him, he’d snapped away and shut down, shut _her_ down, and that had been that. They hadn’t spoken of it, after.

He’d still been her partner, and judging by the light-hearted conversations they’d managed during the mission, and on their way home, he was still willing to be her friend. But that was it, that was all it ever was or would be.  Jyn had just mistaken the reliability of a good partnership and the easiness of real friendship as something…more.

And the nasty, uncompromising, unpleasant truth was, well, she was wrong.

The distant sound of raised voices caught her ear, and Jyn stopped short for a moment to listen before identifying the unmistakable sounds of Leia Organa and Han Solo arguing in the corridor. Jyn grimaced and instantly changed course, turning sharply down a different hall. It would take her an extra ten minutes to get where she was going, but worth it to avoid potentially getting entangled in _that_ shitstorm.

And anyway, how the hells was she supposed to know the difference between friends and, and…whatever she wanted Cassian to be. Friends with benefits? Sexual partners? Lovers? Fuck’s sake, how could she be expected to tell the difference between friends and lovers when she’d never really had either? She’d had comrades-in-arms, and she’d had one-night stands. _Ebajam_ _varbeca troac,_ maybe she just needs to get laid. Find some willing partner for a standard quick fuck and get it out of her system.

The idea makes her cringe (because the harsh truth is that Jyn doesn’t want anyone else, and isn’t sure she could drop her guard around anyone long enough to try it anyway), and so she shoves it away irritably. In fact, she shoves all of it away, this whole line of thinking, because despite her detour she is rapidly approaching her destination, and this is not what she needs to be thinking about when she gets there.

She turns the corner, and the door to Cassian’s quarters comes into view.

They’ve missed a few sessions on the therapy schedule, first because they were on a mission with Bodhi, after which they had immediately been shipped out again to Neshtab and then Thyferra. They’d avoided any major injury (barely, in some cases that she is pointedly _not_ thinking about), and made more than one excellent score of intel, supplies, and on Neshtab, a new recruit. She had pressed her lips (briefly, lightly) on the corner of his mouth after a particularly nasty near-death moment. He had kissed the kriffing daylights out of her a week later.  Then they had stolen some bacta, and Jyn had hit a lot of stormtroopers with her truncheons.

It had been a busy few weeks.

But they were back on Home I, and despite his marked improvement, Cassian was still technically on doctor’s orders to visit the physical therapist-slash-masseuse regularly to deal with his chronic pain and persistent limp. He refused to go, so Jyn had taken it upon herself to learn the basics.

The basics, that was, of putting her hands all over his body. In a purely platonic, helpful partner, never-going-anywhere way.

 _Yes_ , Jyn thinks as she comes to an inevitable halt in front of his door, _that had been a really stellar fucking idea_. Probably only just shy of walking up to him and demanding that he strip for her. Which, if she’s being honest with herself, is more or less what she did anyway. At the time, she’d mostly just been anxious that she’d fuck up his therapy and wanted to see the muscles she was supposed to be dealing with. Or so she told herself, because lies are a great survival tool right up until they bite you in the arse.

 _Partners_ , she reminds herself. _Friends._

He still limps, when he thinks no one can see.

Jyn knocks on the door.

He opens it almost immediately, surprising her. _Was he waiting?_ She glances down – he’s still fully dressed and has a datapad in one hand. Working, then.

“It’s midnight,” she grumbles at him, jerking her head at the datapad.

“Yes,” he replies, stepping aside easily as she walks in.

She glares at the datapad in his hand; he knows what she’s getting at, but he’s a stubborn skrog who likes to play dumb. “You’re still working.”

Cassian shrugs slightly (more range of movement in his shoulders, good), a smile hovering just behind his eyes. “Yes.”

Jyn turns the glare from the datapad to his face, and he meets her eyes calmly. She waits a moment – her stare has been known to crack even the nastiest of opponents – but he simply stands there, watching her with mild interest, as if he has no idea what she’s doing here and is curious to find out.

“We missed a few days,” she concedes at last, and is surprised when Cassian’s eyes widen slightly.

“You still want to…” he trails off, shifting his weight and carefully schooling his face back to neutrality. She knows him well enough to see him actually doing it, smoothing out his eyebrows, relaxing his jaw, shuttering the expression in his eyes.

She understands why he does it, why he learned to do it in the first place.

She hates it anyway.

“You’re still hurting,” she snaps, before catching herself. She’s _angry_ at his obvious surprise, she realizes a beat too late, insulted that he thinks she would turn her back on him just because he denied her what he never owed her in the first place. Well, he’s wrong, and she’s going to prove it to him. Determinedly, she wrestles her irritation (her selfish frustration) back to something manageable. “And you still won’t go to the therapists, so here we are,” she finishes in a much cooler tone, proud that she sounds nearly professional. “And I studied this shit for ages, Andor,” she twists her face into an exaggerated grimace and waves her own datapad at him. “I actually know words like _latissimus dorsi_ and _thoracic_ now. I can’t just sit on that knowledge.”

Cassian’s face relaxes into something less distant, and much more amused. “That would be a waste,” he murmurs, and to her relief moves to sit on his bunk. His datapad ends up tossed carelessly on his footlocker, and he leans stiffly down to pull his boots off. Jyn sits next to him to rip off her own boots and gloves (taking pains not to brush up against him as she does), then shimmies behind him, already reaching out to set her hands firmly against his shoulders. An instant before she touches him, he suddenly reaches back and grabs the neck of his shirt, and with one smooth motion he yanks it over his head.

Jyn freezes.

Without a word, Cassian folds up his shirt and sets it on top of the footlocker next to his datapad. _Odd_ , a part of her mind thinks distantly, _normally he puts it away inside the locker._

The rest of her mind is devoted to creative and extensive cursing.

 _He doesn’t want it_ , she reminds herself as fiercely as she can, and almost viciously conjures up the memory of his face after he’d kissed her, the moment he’d realized what was happening. She forces herself to remember exactly how his eyes had gone distant and uninterested, his lips thinning into a flat line, his jaw slack and unresponsive under her hand. It was like a punch in the gut all over again, and with her own jaw set resolutely, she placed her hands against the bare skin of his back and took a slow, shallow breath.

“ _Latissimus dorsi_ ,” she mutters, and traces it out.

The silence settles around them as she goes, but it’s not the normal comfortable silence of working together, nor is it the intent silence that she’d felt the other two times she did this. That had felt like anticipation, like the silence just before a friendly conversation begins, or a familiar song plays. This feels…it feels like the silence of a crowded public transport, like a waiting room at a clinic, like a place where everyone is trying desperately to avoid starting any conversation at all.

Jyn presses her palms to the scars on Cassian’s lower back and screws her eyes shut. Just for a moment, a breath, she lets herself mourn what she cannot have. Then she opens her eyes and pushes her palms up, rolling the muscles along his spine under her hands and then smoothing them back down.

“I think we’ll be working along the Perlemian Trade Route next,” Cassian breaks the silence so abruptly that Jyn pauses, startled. He sounds strained – he’s speaking to the stranger on the public transport, he’s starting a conversation in the waiting room – and Jyn runs her hands up and down his spine once more before she answers.

“Looking to replace the Corva sector supply lines we lost?”

He nods briefly, and after a beat adds, “I’m guessing Corulag. It’ll have the most options.”

Jyn works her way to his mid back and starts kneading at the stiff muscles under his left shoulder blade, feeling him twitch a little as she works on a particularly tough knot. “Haven’t been there in a couple years,” she answers quietly, because even a stilted conversation about work is better than the uncomfortable silence of strangers.

“It’s been three for me. Curamelle.”

"Not a place I imagined a lot of righteous rebels would hang about," Jyn hums with a little amusement.

"Even righteous rebels need clothes, and some of the Houses are generous in their castoffs." Cassian's voice lightens slightly, "Although once or twice I had to decline. Some things just can't be repurposed to warfare, no matter how creative you get."

jyn snorts at the mental image of their ragtag army trying to weaponized some of the outfits she's seen employees of a Curamelle House wear. "I would have loved to see you try, with some of them," she comments wryly, sliding her palms up his spine again and pressing her fingers carefully into the muscles along his shoulders. She takes pains to avoid a particularly sensitive place just at the nape of his neck; she has no right to touch him there, now that she knows how he reacts to it, and that he doesn’t want to react that way to her. He braces for it anyway, his shoulders tensing slightly under her hands as she nears the spot. When she veers away and digs her fingers into his deltoids instead, he lifts his head slightly, but doesn’t comment. “I used to run goods to the Yhvan district,” she confesses to stop the newly rising awkwardness before it can congeal around them again. “Mostly rare booze and some party drugs, but sometimes weird cloth.”

“Cloth?” Cassian’s head drops again, and she feels him deliberately relaxing the tight muscles of his neck. She’ll have to go back and do his upper back again, she thinks, or he’ll show up at morning meal with his shoulders tight and his face set in harsh lines.

“For a popular House Lady,” Jyn tells him absently, digging her thumbs into the muscles of his lower back. “She liked to make her own outfits, and she had pretty wild taste.”

Cassian grunts slightly as her fingers work the soreness of his lower back. “Okay?” she asks immediately, pausing.

“Good spot,” he replies a little huskily, then in a normal voice asks, “this wouldn’t happen to be the House of the Golden Caravan, would it?”

Jyn goes still for a moment, because, well, _seriously_? “You…know it?”

Cassian sits up a little straighter, possibly mistaking the slightly strangled tone of her voice the wrong way. “I had a contact who liked to meet me there,” he explains, and seems about to continue when Jyn finally loses control and laughs out loud.

“I’ll bet,” she manages, and he turns to scowl at her over his shoulder.

“He was a wealthy businessman who had good credit with most of the Houses and could jolly them into giving more than they would have otherwise,” he tells her a bit defensively. “But he liked to spend most of his free time at the Golden Caravan. He felt safe there.”

“So wait,” Jyn remembers what she’s doing and starts pressing her palms up and down his back again, hard push up and soft pull down, but she can’t quite stop the chuckle as she asks, “you must know who I’m talking about then, right? With the wild outfits?”

Cassian glares at her a moment longer, then rolls his eyes and faces front again, letting her have full access to his shoulders again. “Perhaps,” he mutters.

“She was pretty distinct,” Jyn muses, tracing her way around his muscle groups absently. “Tall, dark skinned, liked to change her hair a lot. I showed up once with a shipment and she was almost completely gold. Even her eyes.”

“I never saw that,” Cassian rolls his shoulders a little under her hands, but it’s a distracted movement, his eyes unfocused as he stares at the wall. “But I remember when she dyed all her braids different colors and wore some kind of…shiny veil over her body.”

“I liked that one.”

“Hm. Didn’t leave much to the imagination, though.”

Jyn smirks a little. “I didn’t mind.”

“The scaled costume was my contact’s favorite.”

He's still too tense, maybe from their recent awkwardness, maybe because it's been too long since she's done this, either way, Jyn drags her fingertips back down to his mid back and starts again. If Cassian notices, he doesn’t react. Jyn hums a little and tilts her head, remembering. “You mean the outfit that made her look like she was eating her way out of a mynock’s chest?”

“Yes.”

“Hah.” She opens her mouth to ask _so which one was your favorite_  before her brain catches up and slams on the breaks, because down that path lies asteroid-dwelling space worms and she’s not going there. “You remember _that_ but you don’t remember her name?”

“It’s hard to forget a dress that looks like it’s still alive.”

“Hard to forget a woman who wears a dress like that,” Jyn needles, because she’s sort of dying to hear him say it. Besides, she's hoping it will distract him from what she's about to do next. "Hey," she says as casually as she can, "here next, okay?" She taps his damaged hip with one finger, waits until he nods, and then without giving either of them time to think about, presses her fingers into the muscles on the outside of his hip. He grunts slightly, his breathing hitching at the pain, but Jyn pauses and takes a deep breath, and he breathes in time with her. She presses in again, breathes with him, then once more. The next time, she says pointedly, "So, who was she, then?"

“I never learned her real name,” he hedges, sounding a little out of breath but not pained.

"Sure," Jyn smiles at the back of his head and pokes him a little in the ribs. “But?”

Cassian sighs slightly. “ _But_ she was my contact’s favorite, so yes, he introduced her.”

“Her real name was...Carlania or Carlottia, I think,” Jyn informs him helpfully, running her knuckles firmly down to the top of his thigh and then back up to his back as smoothly as she can. “Although she went by a stage name. I forget what it was, though.”

“No mames,” Cassian says dryly.

“Well, I _might_ remember,” she concedes, a little giddy that the uncomfortable atmosphere between them has finally dissipated, even with her hands on his hips.  For the first time tonight, it doesn’t feel like she’s forcing small talk with a colleague, but having a real conversation with her partner, with Cassian. She thinks he feels it too, because his arms are propped loosely on his knees and his head is slightly bowed again, and what little she can see of his face looks calm – and amused. “But then, she might have changed her stage name by the time I showed up, " Jyn continues innocently. "What was she calling herself when you knew her?”

He shakes his head slightly, but it’s more to himself than her. “Steel Wrapped In Silk,” he surrenders at last, and Jyn holds back the laughter but doesn’t bother to stop the grin.

“Hmm, guess it was the same,” she agrees genially, and Cassian glances back just long enough to raise an eyebrow at her. “Although when I went last year, she had an apprentice.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Want to guess what she called him?”

“No,” Cassian says flatly.

“Velvet Over Steel,” Jyn says, with great satisfaction.

Cassian groans, rubbing a hand over his face briefly, but she catches the edges of his mouth pulled up in a smile and notes the way his shoulders have completely relaxed at last. She presses her palms up his spine one more time, and decides that this is a good place to stop for tonight. One more hard roll upward, one more soft drag down, trailing her fingertips along the now-smooth muscles along his spine. _There, see?_ _I haven’t fucked everything up after all._

Cassian drops his hand and shifts his weight slightly, but there’s something in the movement that waves a little flag in the back of Jyn’s head. Carefully, she gentles her hands on his back, just in case she’s hurting him. “She was very beautiful,” Cassian says at last, softly, and his voice is just as careful as Jyn’s hands.

“Yes,” Jyn agrees slowly. “Nice, too,” she adds, because she’s not sure what he’s implying (or asking, maybe) but knowing instinctively that if she doesn’t keep the conversation going it will stutter out and they will be back at the awkward silence. “She used to tip me if I found something really pretty for her. Kept trying to recruit me, too. Said I’d always have a roof over my head and food to eat. Appealing, but honestly? Not for me,” Jyn shrugs, more to herself than him. “That life requires too much…” she fades out, hands stilling on his shoulders.

“Performance?”

Jyn swallows. “Trust.”

“Yes,” Cassian says, an unbearable gentleness in his voice.

“I don't,” she starts, and realizes a beat late that she's clenching her fists against his back. She forces her hands to unfold, pressing her palms flat against the scars along his spine. She stares at her scarred knuckles, pale against his skin, and hears herself saying, “I’ve never allowed much more than a quick fuck in the alley. House Ladies have to build relationships with people, make them feel like they're friends, at least. I can't do that. I want more than -” At the last second she realizes what she’s doing, and slams her teeth together, furious with herself for going there, for bringing it up.

Cassian is so still under her hands that she thinks he might not be breathing. Half a dozen of her nastiest Hutt insults razor through Jyn’s mind, and she yanks her hands off his back and rolls to the side. “Sorry,” she mutters darkly, and reaches for her boots.

Next to her, Cassian turns his head, although she resolutely does not look at him. “For what?”

Jyn jerks her laces tight and tucks them into the tops, combat practical and ready to run. “Pushing,” she says at last. “I know I keep…I’m sorry. I’m - ” _being greedy, upsetting you, messing it up, just so fucking **stupid** -_

She gets up, walks briskly towards the door. Pauses, one hand hovering over the door release. “I’ll stop, alright?” She has to keep her voice quiet to keep from wavering, but she forces the words out because he deserves to hear it, deserves that level of respect. “I’ll stop.”

“Jyn,” Cassian says almost directly in her ear, and she nearly slams an elbow back on reflex, because she had been so wrapped up in her own guilt that she hadn’t even noticed him moving. He’s standing only a few millimeters away from her back; Jyn doesn’t dare take a deep breath lest that small movement cause her to brush against him. Slowly, Cassian reaches around and sets his palm against the door, not quite blocking the door release but definitely not making it easy to escape. “Maybe,” he murmurs, his lips so close to her skin that she can almost feel them move, “I want you to push.”

She swallows. “Maybe?”

He nods, a small dip of his chin that causes his cheek to scrape lightly against hers, and _damn it all to the many hells_ , her face floods with heat. Jyn Erso does not blush, in fact, until about thirty seconds ago she didn’t think she _could_.

“Maybe,” Cassian says, just above a whisper, “I need you to.”

That startles her a little out of her stupor, and Jyn risks a slight turn of her head, to look back at him the way he’s been looking back at her all these nights. She can’t quite twist enough to see his eyes, but she finds herself staring at the curve of his cheek, the lines of his mouth, and she bites her lower lip, just a little. "Plenty of people here would love to scratch that itch with you," she tells him, and she means it to be pragmatic, but instead it comes out tentative, and she curses at herself.

"I don't want that," he responds flatly, and she flinches a little as his lips thin. "And I don't think you do, either."

"No," she admits, and hard line of his mouth softens again. Jyn tries again, carefully. “I’ve already…” she frowns, struggling once again for the right words. “A lot’s changed for you, since Scarif. Since…me.”

Cassian nods again, and because her head is turned, this time they don’t touch. She marvels at the weight of the disappointment that hits her when she notes the loss.

“Change is dangerous,” she tells him quietly, honestly. “And I’ve already gotten you in plenty of trouble.”

For a long moment, they simply stand there, so close that she can feel his warmth, feel the phantom pressure of his arm where it just misses her waist. Then Cassian lets out a short, soft breath, and drops his head to rest against her shoulder. Jyn closes her eyes.

“Before Scarif,” his voice is low, rough, and it reverberates through her bones like a song, “before _you_ , I would have said that _this_ ,” he brings his other arm up, rests his free hand lightly against her waist, just skimming against the curve of her body. Jyn’s skin immediately lights up beneath his palm, and she lets herself lean back, just barely, just enough. Cassian catches her weight easily, like he was ready for it. “That this was…unnecessarily dangerous,” he goes on with only a minor hitch in his voice, “but when I look back at my life before you, before everything - ” he shakes his head against her shoulder and his fingers suddenly clutch her side, as if he’s lost his balance and needs to steady himself against her. “Nothing in my life had changed for a very long time, and didn’t look like it ever really would.”

“Safer,” Jyn murmurs.

“No,” Cassian’s voice is abruptly solid again, calm and certain, though he does not lift his head and his fingers curl tight into her shirt. “I had no hope, Jyn,” he tells her, as dispassionately as if he’s discussing the weather, or a mission brief. “It was destroying me.” He lifts his head, and though Jyn doesn’t open her eyes she knows he’s looking right at her. “I think life is change, Jyn. Only the dead are static.”

 _Rebellions are built on hope_ echoes in her head, and Jyn tries to remember exactly how he'd looked when he said it. At the time, she'd thought he was a naïve fool. Now she wonders if there had been an undercurrent of bitterness in his voice, if he'd been throwing the words at her like a joke, like a weapon.

 "What do you want?" Her voice is too loud, too harsh for how close he is, and she winces, expecting him to pull away.

He doesn't, though his fingers loosen against her side and lift just off her skin again, ready to drop. Jyn hesitates for half a second, then makes a decision. She reaches up and laces her fingers through his, pressing his hand back against her waist and holding it there. 

Another long, quiet moment passes, and then, "Whatever you will give me."

And Jyn _gets_ it.

She tilts her head back slowly, rests it against his chest for a moment. "Alright," she says. "Alright."

And then she pushes herself back upright, slowly, so he knows that she's not rejecting him. "You need to sleep," Jyn tells him firmly, stepping away just enough so she can turn and look him in the eye. "You haven't since Thyferra. I'll see you at tomorrow's brief," she gives him a half-smile, rolling her eyes a little, "I think Colter's giving it. Be prepared for a lot of puns."

"I'm never prepared for Colter's puns," Cassian mutters, his eyes fixed on her face, watching her as closely as he watches a new contact, or an uncertain situation.

"No one is," Jyn agrees, and then leans up and presses her lips to his, gently. He leans into it, but doesn't stop her when she pulls away. _Later,_ she thinks to him, and smiles again when she sees him register the promise.

"Alright," he agrees.

Jyn hits the door release and steps out into the red light of the hallway, glancing back only once to see that he hasn't moved from where she left him. The scarlet night-time lights of the cruiser turn him a strange mix of red and grey, backlit by the soft yellow light of his quarters. He looks like a being made of fire and shadow, and she knows she looks the same to him.

Then the door times out and slides shut, and Jyn sets off down the hall. It's ridiculously late, only a couple of hours before the morning shift takes over, and Jyn hasn't really slept any more than Cassian in the last few days, but her steps are light and her mind is buzzing.

The truth, she thinks a little blurrily, and almost smiles (she doesn't, not out here, but she thinks about it), because the truth is that Cassian wants her. Not just as a partner, not just as a friend, not even just as a friend with benefits or fuck-buddy or whatever it's called. He wants _her,_ all of her, whatever that means, _whatever you will give me._ He doesn't seem entirely sure where to go from here, and hells, neither is Jyn, but if he's willing to figure it out with her then the truth is that she doesn't really care. The truth is that Cassian wants her.

Jyn strides through Home I and acknowledges to herself that sometimes the truth is better than any lie.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Ebajam varbeca troac" = mandolarian curse that more or less means "[My] Stupid disobedient genitals" (it's sort of a reference to my other story ["fighting words,"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11587698/chapters/26041596) because I love languages and I'm always particularly fascinated by profanity. Not important to this story, but just in case you're interested.
> 
> Curamelle is a major city on Corulag, although almost nothing is known about it in canon. I went with "full of high-end geisha houses" because of course I did. Maybe at some point I'll send Jyn and Cassian there, and we can explore the Houses. For the record, I have strong views about respect and dignity for sex workers, and I hope that Cassian and Jyn's attitudes never come off as condescending or judgmental. Please feel free to point that out to me if you feel I pushed too far into that territory.
> 
> "Steel Wrapped in Silk" is courtesy of rinsantago, and "Velvet Over Steel" comes from aewgliriel - because my House Lady and her apprentice have healthy senses of humor and the House of the Golden Caravan has a large library of erotic novels.
> 
> Also: I just realized that I never explained the "red hallway lights" thing - for those who may be confused, on ships it is customary at night time to turn the normal bright white overhead lights to a sim "red" light instead. It helps differentiate between night and day when you're inside with no windows, and it doesn't ruin your night vision (like when you leave your room to visit the bathroom, or go from the bridge to the interior for a moment), and if someone opens a hatch to the outside it doesn't shine bright white light on the ship, which can confuse other ships. That last one probably isn't terribly important from a "spaceship" point of view, but the convenience part still stands.


	4. a song of love, a song of hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He asked her to push him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this took approximately forever.

Cassian sits in his dark quarters and tries not to overthink this.

It is not an easy thing to do, not for him. He has spent his life obsessing over details, hunting down the thinnest leads, tracing the barest rumors, watching micro-expressions and sentient body language. He never walks into a room without scanning it for exits or points of vulnerability. He never talks to another sentient without picking apart their every word to find the intent behind it.

Well, almost never, on that last one. Kay has long been an exception to that rule, because Kay says exactly what he means and his intent is usually “my information is correct.” Cassian is well aware that the droid grates on most people’s nerves, but Kay’s complete lack of social graces has always felt a little bit like a relief, to him.

And now, of course, there is Jyn. Like Kay, Jyn is blunt to the point of rudeness, generally uninterested in small talk, and never pretends to like people when she doesn’t. He thinks that maybe this is what drew him to her so strongly, back in the beginning. She was cagey and careful, but she did not lie to him. She still doesn’t; on missions, in the command center, when working through pre-brief data crunching or just talking through their lives in between work, Jyn never lies to him about, well, anything.

On the other hand, she’s also very…compassionate. Not that many seem to know that (the current popular gossip is that Jyn Erso is actually a very life-like, illegal android that Andor somehow reprogrammed into yet another grouchy synthetic soldier for the Rebellion. Bodhi and Jyn laughed like fools when they heard that one, although Cassian wasn’t particularly amused). Despite her introverted nature and permanent wary expression, though, Cassian has seen her go out of her way to help people who barely intersected her life at all.

And he knows she cares about him – how could he think any different, when she spends half her time helping him with his intel analysis, his reports, his personal projects in the droid bay…and of course, his physical therapy? He made every effort to hide it, but somehow Jyn had known exactly how much pain he was in, and while she could easily have simply badgered him to see the doctors, instead she’d gone and researched his medical needs and taken care of it herself. Him. Taken care of _him_. It had stunned him, and humbled him, and, well, _encouraged_ him.

Cassian leans forward on his bunk and rubs a hand hard against his face, because this is exactly what he’s trying not to think about right now. Or rather, what he’s trying not to _overthink_.

She didn’t come tonight.

Last time she came to his room for his therapy, it had been…a little awkward. He’d lost his control on a mission, kissed her the way he’d been dying to for months, and then promptly withdrawn and left her obviously confused and uncomfortable. And she had still come back. She had still wanted to help. She had still offered him more trust and acceptance than he knew what to do with, and in turn he’d asked her to…keep offering it?

He asked her to push him.

She’d seemed alright with that. He’d thought she was alright with it. He sure as hell was alright with it. Not that he knew exactly what “pushing” entailed, not really. But he had assumed they would work on that.

Of course, the very next day, they had been tapped for a three day recon in the Goti system, and with the buffer of Bodhi, Kay, and the easy but time-consuming work of slicing into Imperial network feeds and sifting through for useful data – well, they hadn’t really done anything aside from the work. They had barely even been awake at the same time, taking turns sleeping in the narrow fold-out bunk of the U wing while the other monitored the frequencies. _Mierda_ , the closest he came to even touching her had been when her shoulder brushed against his in passing, or the soft trail of her fingers over his hand when she woke him up to switch places.

A month ago, that would have been a completely normal amount of contact. Six months ago, it would have been a wildly excessive amount of contact. But for the last three days, he’d found himself feeling bereft, restless and over-sensitive and constantly craving _more_.

Stupid, really; Cassian lived twenty-six years without Jyn Erso, and for the majority of those years, he’d barely touched anyone at all (outside of combat or the casually dangerous contact of a crowd), and more importantly, he’d barely noticed the lack. It was just…life.

Now he’s sitting in the dark in the middle of night shift, trying not to stare at the chrono, trying not to feel disappointed that she didn’t come and massage him again.

…yes, damn it, that still sounds dirty.

 _She was tired_ , he tells himself. It was a busy mission, even though they barely left the ship. _She doesn’t owe you this_. Maybe she reconsidered, decided that they were pushing into something she didn’t really want - no, _no_ , he is not going down that path. She said _alright_. She _kissed_ him. Jyn doesn’t lie about her feelings.

(She might, though. For him. If she thought he needed it.)

So she didn’t come tonight? So what? It’s been one night. He doesn’t need her to hover around him. He just needs…

He needs to stop thinking about it. He needs to clear his head. He needs to get some kriffing sleep, because tomorrow is already promising to be a busy day. He needs -

\- he needs to pick up his blaster and aim it at the door, because someone is slicing the lock.

His door slides open three seconds after his ear catches the hum of the lock disengaging, so he only has time to grab the small blaster strapped to the underside of his bunk and raise it as the red light of the hallway floods in.

“Thought you’d be asleep,” the figure silhouetted in the dim light says softly, and Cassian drops the blaster to his lap.

“So you broke in?” He regrets the question as soon as he says it, because he tries so hard to hide the relief in his tone that it comes out cold and accusatory instead. Jyn steps back, one foot out of the door, and Cassian could smack himself. “Didn’t you hear my code when we picked up room assignments?” He shoves the blaster back under his bunk and forces his voice to be light as possible.

“Figured you’d have changed it already,” she says in the same tone, still half-in, half-out of the room.

Normally, she’d be right. Every room on Home I has a particular code to it, recorded in the quartermaster’s system to allow the quartermasters a database of all current codes in use. They’re always getting snippy with Intel personnel, who slice the codes and alter them every time they are assigned a new room. Cassian typically changes his code within the first hour of settling into new quarters, but tonight he had been distracted.

 _Sloppy, Andor_ , Draven snaps in the back of his mind. _Getting so tangled up in your fantasies_. “Are you coming in?” he asks, not particularly interested in pursuing that line of thought.

She steps inside the room again, but doesn’t close the door or come closer. He can’t see her features, backlit as she is by the red lights, but her voice is quiet and a little too cool. “Do you want me to?” (He just had to snap at her, didn’t he? Overcompensating for his lack of self-control, _very sloppy, Andor_.)

He doesn’t know how to explain that, so he falls back on the only thing he can do around Jyn. He tells the truth. “Yes.”

She takes a deep breath, hits the door panel and moves slowly towards the bed through the dark. He listens to her approach, mindful of his own breathing, holding very still until her outstretched fingertips glance against his shoulder. “Sorry I’m late,” she murmurs, resting her hand as light as a bird on his shoulder. “Got stuck in the comm hub.”

He sits up a little straighter, ignores the twinge of pain that pulls at his ribs. “The Lorell operation?”

“Yeah.” She shuffles a little closer, he feels the faint vibration of her knees hitting the mattress, and then feels her lean on him slightly as she uses her free hand to wrestle off her boots. This is ridiculous, he has a small light on his desk, he should flip it on. Or at least offer to flip it on.

“Something from the data crunchers?” he hazards. He hears her boots thunk against his floor, then her hand withdraws for a moment as she tugs off her gloves and drops them carelessly by her boots.

“Yeah, our favorite cruncher dug up some stream about a castle or something there. The Evil Castle?” Her hand reaches out and brushed across his shoulder again, as if she’s checking that he’s still there, then she pulls back and he hears the faint clink of…her weapon’s harness, yes, that sounds about right.

He leans forward on his elbows and considers her words. He hasn’t been on Lorell in years, but he’s heard there’s a thriving blood sports industry there. He runs through the major players as he tries to ignore the sound of Jyn sliding the harness that holds her blaster and truncheons down over her hips and thighs and hanging it on the corner of his bed. Do any of the big names involve a castle? “The Palace of Good and Evil?” he recalls suddenly. “Am found something at the Palace of Good and Evil?”

“Yeah,” Jyn’s hand glances across his shoulder again (it reminds him of the last mission, tiny, brief touches that make him want to arch under her palm like some kind of lothal-cat, and he’s getting so tired of holding himself still). “Big event going down soon. He got real excited about it, said Draven was going to love the, ah, _side quests_.” Her voice is full of dry humor on that last one; Am does have an odd tendency to fixate on games, and Jyn claims to never know what exactly he’s talking about. Cassian lets the corner of his mouth pull upward into a small smile as he pictures that slightly bewildered expression she always gets when she listens to the excitable data analysist chatter. “So I’m betting we ship out soon,” she continues, and then he hears the soft but distinct slide of metal on metal. She puts her hand on his shoulder once more, this time to brace herself as she leans across his chest and sets the metal thing on his footlocker. _Knife from her right boot_ , he thinks absently, though most of his mind is occupied with how close she is, and how _good_ she smells.

“Good,” he mutters, and again forces himself to stay still as she pulls away and there’s another soft slide of metal. This part is new, her methodical removal of all her weapons. Normally she just takes off her boots and gloves before she climbs into bed with – before she kneels on the bed behind him. This is a whole new level of trust that she is granting him, alone in the dark without her weapons.

“Could be fun,” Jyn agrees nonchalantly, and then leans across him again to set the second knife down ( _switchblade from her_ _left sleeve_ , she really is completely de-arming, isn’t she? He’s a little surprised, a little alarmed, and a little humbled. He’s never seen her willingly do this. He’s not sure he’s ever seen her do this at all - Jyn has an incredible talent for hiding weapons on her body.)

His eyes have readjusted to the total dark now, but the only light in here is the very faint glimmer of red coming in under the door, so all he can make out is her vague silhouette. She pulls the knife from her right arm next, then to his real shock, she unsnaps the slender straps that hold the blades on her forearms and also sets those aside (leaning against his shoulder, brushing his chest with her arm as she sets them down, and he considers for a moment that she genuinely is trying to drive him mad).

She’s down to the wicked vibroblade on the front of her belt and the curving chakram tucked in the back of it. He half-expects her to take those off one by one, but instead, he hears the faint clink of her belt buckle, and then she simply strips the whole thing off. ( _Four counts in_ , he reminds his lungs, _and six out. Slow your damn heartrate. Control yourself_.) Jyn tosses her belt lightly and he hears it land on the footlocker with a clatter of metal and leather.

That’s everything, isn’t it? No, wait, he can just see her raising her hands to her hair and tugging at it. She pulls something from the back of her head and tosses it too. It lands with a much higher-pitched ringing noise. “Lockpicks,” she explains, possibly sensing his gaze (he’d be surprised if she didn’t, because he’s staring at her like his life depends on it, and he ought to stop but somehow can’t muster up the will). Another small ringing sound as the second pick joins it. Her hand brushes his shoulder again (he doesn’t twitch, but only just), then she pauses, pulls away again ( _hijo de mil putas,_ is she doing this on purpose? Has he pissed her off lately and not noticed?) and fumbles with her mechanic’s vest. She pulls something from a pocket near her heart and tosses it, too. It lands with a significantly heavier clanking sound. “Brass knuckles,” she states serenely.

“Jyn,” he says, realizes how strained his voice sounds, and takes a deep breath. ( _Control yourself, Cassian.)_ “Prepping for a major offensive?”

“Hm?” The mattress dips as she slides onto it and shimmies behind him, using his shoulder as a reference point. (A part of him remembers how for the last twenty years he hasn’t let anyone stand in his peripheral vision without his nerves screaming at him, but for some reason, Jyn doesn’t trigger that alarm at all. She slips completely behind him in the total darkness and all he can think is _finally._ )

“You came armed for a rancor,” he points out, which is a stupid thing to say because she always has that many weapons on her, he knows this, what is _wrong_ with his brain?

“No,” she says lightly, settling both her hands on his shoulders and then sliding them deliberately down his spine to the scars on his lower back. “Wookie, at best.”

He huffs a laugh at the pleased tone in her voice, then sucks in a breath as her clever fingers find the edge of his shirt (he left it untucked, telling himself it was more comfortable to sleep that way while he eyed the door). “Can I?” she asks, because she always asks, and he’s half exasperated and half grateful every time.

“Yes.” He helps her pull it over his head, bites the inside of his mouth a little when her fingertips glance along his bared shoulder blade before she snatches the shirt from his hands and…

“Are you _folding_ it?” he demands, because that is also new.

“You always fold it,” she says, though the hint of uncertainty is back in her voice.

“You always try to throw it on the floor,” he retorts, trying not to think too hard about the warmth spreading through his chest. She hates folding her clothes, considers it completely pointless. Wrinkles are someone else’s problem, in Jyn’s world.

“Yeah, well,” she huffs, shoving past the awkward moment and placing her hands on his back again. “Cassian,” she starts in a different voice, softer, more urgent. “Before I start…”

She trails off, but this part is almost routine by now, so he fills in. “If I want you to stop, I’ll say so.”

“Right, yes, that too,” she replies quickly. “But I wanted to - ” she makes a low noise that sounds a little like a growl, and then in the harsh tone that means she’s frustrated spits, “I want something from you.”

It’s on the tip of his tongue to say _anything,_ but he catches it at the last moment, because it’s maybe just a little too…needy? Desperate? (Honest.) Instead, he lets himself lean back, just slightly, into her hands, and say instead, “What is it, Jyn?”

The movement seems to shake her from whatever irritable reverie she’s in, and she pushes her palms slowly up his spine to his shoulders and then drags her fingertips back down again (his skin heats up immediately wherever she touches, and he has to remind himself not to arch back into it. _Control, Cassian. Let her work._ ) “I want to ask some questions,” she says, and slides her hands up and down his spine again, pressing just a little harder this time. “And you have to answer, okay? You can say that “I don’t know” or “I can’t answer that,” or whatever,” she’s still talking too quickly, though her hands are steady on his skin as she starts to knead the muscles near his shoulder blades. “But you have to answer. Alright?”

It seems like a strange request, not because he doesn’t want to answer, but because he’s never refused to answer a question from her before (well, not since Eadu. Definitely not since he woke up in the med ward after Scarif to find her there, holding his hand and watching him with those bright green eyes). Does she think he is still lying to her? No, she didn’t specify that he had to answer _honestly_ , only that he had to answer.

He’s not sure what this is about, and maybe it’s just that her fingers are digging so beautifully into a knot he didn’t even realize was there, or maybe it’s the total darkness, but he finds himself almost eager to tell her whatever it is she wants to hear. “Alright,” he says at last, grunting a little in pleasure as she jams her knuckles hard into the tight spot just below his right shoulder.

“I’ll believe you, Cassian,” she tells him quietly, “anything you say,” and before he can mentally process the reaction _those_ words have on his body, she starts working on another knot and asks, “what’s your favorite color?”

He closes his eyes and this time allows himself to slouch a little under her touch. He never really understands how tense his back is until her hands are on it. On him. _The question, Andor_.

“I don’t know,” he admits, a little embarrassed to be caught out by the first question. She pauses briefly against his back, then starts to slide her hands up and down his spine again, her go-to move when she’s unsure or lost in thought.

“Really?”

“I never thought about it.”

Jyn hums, and then traces out the muscles that connect his neck and shoulders. “Trapezius,” she mumbles absently, then, “If you had to pick one?”

“Green,” he says. Wait, will she think that he’s just flirting? He really hasn’t ever thought about a favorite -

Jyn digs her thumbs into the tops of his shoulders, sending a sweet spike of relief through his entire upper body, and he inhales sharply as he forgets whatever he was thinking. She said she would believe him. He’s overthinking again. _Kriff_ , that feels good.

She pushes her thumbs into that same spot again (he doesn’t gasp this time, ready for it), then moves back up and down his spine. He can hear the smile in her voice; clearly his reaction amused her. “Do you know how to dance?”

“Some.”

“Where did you learn?”

Cassian has to think about that for a second, especially when she shifts her weight behind him and he feels the slight pressure of her knees against his ass. “Dantooine,” he remembers finally. “As a teenager. Needed to learn for an op.”

He knows what she’s doing, of course. He’s done the same thing himself, more than once (well, not exactly the same thing. Backrubs are not exactly his preferred technique). Stage one of non-accusatory interrogation: easy, short-answer questions, the kinds of things that even a stranger would rarely feel uncomfortable answering. It’ll be free narrative questions next; she’ll ask him to describe an event or a place, and then let him talk until he’s finished.

Her hands are warm when she cups them around the back of his neck for a moment, and he can’t stop the little hitch in his breath as he anticipates her pressing hard against _that spot_ – but she slides her hands away again, up and down his spine, and asks, “What was that like, learning to dance on a military base?” (And there it is. Stage two: free narrative questions. The best part, he muses, is that she _knows_ that he knows what she’s doing. She knows that he has enough experience and training to resist, too, or deflect, or turn it back on her. And she _also_ knows that he’ll answer her anyway, because she asked him to at the start.)

(Damn, she’s good.)

“Almost fun,” he says, then has to stop and gather his thoughts again because she’s moving down to his lower back, her thumbs making those tiny, precise circles across the muscles on either side of his scars. It’s borderline painful, but once she passes over the same spot once or twice, the release of tension is so great that the first time she’d done it, he’d nearly collapsed.

“Almost?” she prompts, and he realizes he’s been quiet too long, lost in her touch (and the memory of her touch, _joder_ , he has it bad, doesn’t he?).

“My instructor was a very large Cerean,” he explains. “He was not a friendly man, either, and he had been a master of ceremonies on his planet before he joined the Rebellion. Very precise, very specific about the steps,” Cassian grimaces a little, partially at the pressure of her thumbs on a particularly sore spot and partially at the memory of stiff-lipped Dis Seirr’s unimpressed scowl. “And I was, ah, not so graceful.”

“You?” she murmurs a touch mockingly, and runs her palms soothingly over the sore spot.

“I was fifteen,” he shoots back. “Lanky. Awkward.” He had hated every moment of it, too, feeling like he was constantly hungry, his limbs never quite the length he thought they were, and of course, his voice had cracked for almost two years before finally settling. It made every field op that much more difficult.

She hums again, and her hands fall back into that soothing, mindless rhythm up and down his spine. “Why do you like droids?” she shifts the subject abruptly, and if she’s leading him to something, he has no idea what it might be. He’s not worried, though. It’s Jyn. Maybe she just wants to…know more about him. He shouldn’t find that so surprising. (He does. She’s always surprising him.)

Again, he has to think about the answer for a moment (she’s tracing out the shapes of his muscles again, and he can’t help the little shiver when her fingers glance too close to a sensitive spot on his ribs). “They make sense,” he says at last. “There’s some variation in personality, but for the most part, they have designated responses and clear processes. You can, you can open them up and,” he struggles for the words, and Jyn slides her hands down to his lower back and anchors her thumbs on his hips, just below his belt. “See how they work,” he finishes lamely as he recognizes what she’s about to do.

“Ready?” she asks softly, and he nods before he remembers she probably can’t see it.

“Yes.”

“When you programmed Kay,” she slips her fingers down to his hips and pauses again, “did you overwrite his original personality programming?”

Ah, stage three, direct questions, carefully worded to avoid any emotionally loaded or accusatory terms. He opens his mouth to answer just as she digs her hands hard into his hips. The pain that stabs down his left hip and leg is sharp, but significantly less intense than the first time she’d done it. He’s actually improving, at long last. “No,” he gasps, and shifts a little to give her easier access to his lower body (not as much as he’d like, but… _shut up. Focus_ ). “I extracted the ownership module and rewired his central - ” Jyn rolls her fingers against his hips and then down the curve of his ass, and he swallows as the little jolt that shoots through his hips turns from one kind of tension to another entirely, “ – his, ah, central processors to function without it. It took some work. KX series are designed to - ” again, and now the sensation in his lower body has nothing to do with pain at all, “ - shut down automatically if the owner box is damaged or removed.”

“Clever,” she says, and he hadn’t noticed her moving closer until her breath brushes across the back of his neck (she has to be doing this deliberately – wait, maybe the questions aren’t the goal after all? Maybe they are just the distraction. _Damn_ , she really is good at this. How much did Saw Gerrera teach her, and how much is simply Jyn’s natural talent for getting under his skin?)

She moves her hands up from his hips to his shoulders again. (He’s not disappointed. He needs a moment to collect himself anyway.) Stage four, he thinks hazily. Stage four is cross-questioning. She’ll pick some detail from his story and repeat it back, maybe get it a little wrong, to see if he’ll correct it, enforce a pattern of honesty until –

“Cassian,” Jyn is definitely leaning forward, her mouth can’t be more than a few milimeters from his ear, “do you like this?” And then she digs her fingers into the spot at the nape of his neck, hard.

Distantly, he is a little embarrassed at the groan that tears out of him, and even more so at the way he can’t help but arch back into her hands. In all honesty, he doesn’t really care enough to stop either. It feels like half his nerves have just lit up inside him, and heat races down his spine and coils in his groin. (Even more distantly, a loose, sparking wire in his brain adds, _I was wrong, she’s not moving to stage four at all, this was her plan and I had no idea, she might even be better at this than me, but honestly who the hell cares?)_

“That a yes?” Jyn sounds like she’s on the verge of laughter.

“Mm,” he grunts at her, words temporarily lost to him.

She smooths her hands over his shoulders and down his upper arms for a moment, then back up. “Do you mind if I do it again?”

He shakes his head, forgetting again that she can’t see him. But she’s close enough that maybe she can feel the movement, because she slips her gifted, beautiful fingers back to that spot and presses, a little more slowly, smoothly. The rolling pressure makes the corresponding heat cascade down his back in waves instead of a single spike, and he doesn’t even try to hold back the groan this time.

“Would you like it if I kissed you?” Jyn whispers in his ear, and if she doesn’t have mercy on him soon, he’s going to lose what little control he has left. (And she hasn’t even really touched him anywhere intimate. Traditionally intimate. His dick, is what he means. _Mierda_. He’s babbling inside his own idiot head.)

“Yes,” he remembers to answer, because she asked him to answer her questions. They’re back to stage one type questions, single-worded answers, but that’s good. He probably can’t give anything more complex than that, not with her mouth soft and wet against the nape of his neck, _santisimo Fuerza –_

He was an idiot to worry earlier. She is definitely alright with pushing him.

“Last question,” Jyn says against his skin (he bows his head, eyes closed and hands curled into fists in a last ditch effort to pull himself together). “Do you want this?”

Her sneaks her hands under his arms and around his waist, her chest pressed against his back now with only her thin shirt between them, and even with the fire she’s set smoldering in his skin, he wants to sink back into her warmth.

And since that’s more or less what she’s asking of him, he does. “Yes, Jyn,” he says roughly into the dark, tilting his head back onto her shoulder and reveling in the sensation of her body curled around him. “This. And what we had before,” he adds, because she asked him to answer all her questions, and he means to do it, even the ones she hasn’t voiced. “Working together. Honesty. Your terrible novels.” He smiles a little at that one, remembers how she’d laughed as she tormented him with a long list of filthy words that made him want to pin her down and kiss her breathless. “Love, sex, friendship,” he shakes his head and gives silent thanks for the darkness that hides his face, makes it easier to speak the truths he’s been afraid to say in the light. “All of it, Jyn.”

“Whatever you will give me,” she whispers against his throat, echoing his words to her.

Slowly, carefully, he lifts one hand from his leg until his fingertips find her mouth, and traces a soft line along her lower lip. “Whatever you will give me.”

She shifts a little closer, her knees on either side of his hips and her body curled around him, holding him tight. “Good start?” she asks, a hint of laughter and challenge mixed together in her voice.

Cassian traces his hand down her cheek and makes careful note of the way she nuzzles against his fingers in response. “Yes,” he says, and for once, he doesn't have to force himself to believe it, doesn't feel compelled to pick at all the seams and look for the fatal flaw.  Jyn doesn't lie to him, and he means exactly what he says. “Good start.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sort of wanted to veer off into a smut ending, but the theme of this story was trust and intimacy through touch (not specifically sexual, although yeah, it does translate that way, too). Or maybe I'm just way too timid about this sort of thing. Working on it.
> 
> Thanks again to everyone who read and commented on this weirdly-timelined, overly detailed foray into medical jargon, intimate touching, and ridiculously overblown pining!


	5. Epilogue - I follow you until the death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short piece for [aewgliriel](http://archiveofourown.org/users/aewgliriel/pseuds/aewgliriel) / @rebelle-capitan, who had a terrible neck ache and asked the internet for something to distract them. (It isn't smut, sorry, I can't hammer that out in an hour, but I can do fictional neck rubs! Hope it helps?)

“Deltoid?” Cassian hazards, tilting his head forward to give her a better angle on his neck and back as Jyn’s warmth settles in the narrow space behind him. He tries to shift forward on the hard U Wing bunk to give her more room, but she grabs his shoulders and drags him back, shuffling her knees to either side of his hips instead. She's close enough now that he can feel her breath ghosting across the nape of his neck, easy and calm and completely unselfconscious.

“Try again,” she says, pressing her palms against the thick surgical scars on his lower back for a moment, her anchoring point whenever she does this for him. Someday he is going to have to talk to her about that.

Not today, though.

Jyn traces her fingertips up his spine to the exposed skin of his neck, then tugs gently at his collar. He raises his arms and helps her pull his shirt over his head, and when she tries to snatch it from his hands and toss it on the floor, he grabs her wrist and kisses her palm. Jyn jumps slightly, startled by the suddenly wet warmth of his mouth on her skin, and Cassian deftly swipes the shirt from her fingers. Jyn huffs impatiently behind him as he folds it neatly in his lap, then reaches to flip open the small locker near the bed and set it in. The movement sends a sharp spike of pain through his shoulder and neck, and he clenches his jaw to control it. Jyn is worried enough after that dive he’d taken yesterday. It hadn’t been that bad of a fall, and significantly better than taking a stormtrooper’s bolt through the chest, which had been his other option. All the same, he tries not to remind her. Or himself.

“Latismas…something,” he guesses again quickly, before he can start dwelling on the ugly operation yesterday that had almost killed them both - _yes,_ dwelling _, just like that, you fool,_ he growls at himself internally, shoving at the swell of fear. He leans back carefully and tries to relax both shoulders as Jyn’s hands resettle on his skin, her gloves now gone and her fingers warm and calloused against him.

“Latissimus dorsi,” she corrects, and he can hear the smile in her voice. “And no. Guess again.” She digs her fingers into the muscles of his upper back, just below his shoulder blades, and he feels her lean a little into him. The confines of the ship press her closer than she has ever been before during their therapy sessions (if he's still daring to call them that, considering what they almost inevitably become near the end). “Give you a hint,” she teases, and then she leans forward and murmurs against his ear, “it sounds like it’s own shape.” Her breath curls around his ear and makes his back arch slightly as he instinctively presses back into her. He feels her lips curve against his ear, and then she settles again, her hands on his shoulders and digging into the stiff muscles there.

Cassian’s breath catches slightly, and he lets his eyes slide closed. “Who said I’m guessing?” he asks in a voice that he is proud to note is perfectly even and not at all strained. “I’m a very educated man, you know.”

“But not a particularly graceful one,” Jyn snorts, although there's an edge hidden in her light tone, and her hands press a little harder against his lower back as she says it.

She had screamed when he went down, a small, harsh cry that ripped from her guts and rang in his ears.

It's been…difficult to get that sound out of his head, even after they escaped, after they made it to the U Wing and the stars streaked past the viewscreen, after they both surged up from their seats, hands pulling desperately at each other’s clothes to check for blood, for breaks, for the kind of hardness in the belly that signaled internal bleeding and slow, painful death.

The sound of her scream haunted him all last night, even with the reassuring rhythm of Jyn’s breathing against his chest. He had rolled onto his side after she got up for her turn to check the helm and the message traffic. Maybe it was pathetic to miss her when she was ten meters away and gone less than an hour. Cassian had fisted his hand into the small warm spot on the sheet left behind by her body and decided that he didn’t care.  When she came back, he’d curled himself around her and tucked his hand under her shirt and against her chest, palm flat over her heart. She hadn’t seemed to mind.

The memory of her soft skin under his fingers clashes with the hard edges of the terrifying mission. “The shape of itself,” Cassian repeats softly, trying to get his scattered thoughts in order. She did this to him a lot.

He did not regret holding her, particularly not when she'd woken a little while later with a gasp and only stopped shaking after several minutes of him stroking his hand down her side. He would do it again in a heartbeat, in fact, planned to do it again tonight (every night, always). Of course, lying on his side for a prolonged time hadn’t done his ( _still healing, damn it_ ) wretched spine any favors, so he’s woken up with a horrible crick in his neck and a tension headache. Jyn noticed it immediately, despite his best efforts to stretch it out on his own, and she’d waited only long enough for them to send off their reports and check their incoming comms. And then she’d dragged him by the hand back to the bunk and more or less shoved him down.

He hadn’t particularly objected.

Jyn’s strong hands knead at his lower back, and this time Cassian allows himself to arch into it, because the little spark of embarrassment in the back of his mind is easily burned away by the flare of desire in his body – and the bright flame of what he suspects might be happiness in his chest. It's been a long time since he's really felt that kind of thing, and he can't specifically recall a time when he felt anything quite like the odd blend of iron trust, fiery need, and quiet hope that Jyn tends to inspire in him. Sometimes he feels like Jyn Erso stomped into his life and flipped everything he knew completely on it's head, and other times it simply feels like...like regaining the ability to see color after a lifetime of seeing only greys. Like living huddled over a slowly dying fire and not even knowing why he was cold until she walked up and dumped an armload of fuel on it.

Damn. He doesn't know how to describe it. He isn’t sure what it even means, not really. Whatever it is, whatever they have made together that burns now in his chest, Cassian cups his hands around it to keep it alive and _hopes_.

“So?” Jyn interrupts his thoughts, grinding her knuckles up and down the muscles along the sides of his spine.

Cassian opens his eyes and frowns; they’ve been quiet so long that he’s lost the thread of the conversation.

“Which muscle did you tweak?” Jyn prompts him, pausing to lift one hand from his back and poking at the sore side of his neck gently. “Come on, I’ve told you the name before. Pay attention, hot shot spy boy.”

Stiff or not, Cassian can still move quickly, and he snaps up and catches her hand, pulling it to his lips and pressing a swift kiss to her finger. Jyn growls (a low, abrupt sound disguised as irritation, but he can feel her shift her weight on her knees around his hips, and he isn’t fooled). She tugs at his grip, and he bites her knuckle gently and lets go. “Thyroid?”

“No,” she says a touch sharply, and he smirks to himself. “I mean, that’s not even a muscle,” she recovers, clearing her throat. Her hands slide to his shoulders, and then she starts to roll the stiff muscles there under her fingers. She presses a little harder on his left shoulder than his right, and Cassian nods in answer to her unspoken question. That is the side that he wrenched when he took the dive. “Wait,” she says abruptly, shifting both hands to his left shoulder for a moment. “ _Is_ a thyroid a muscle?”

“Think it’s a gland,” Cassian replies, forcing himself to breath steadily as Jyn’s hands knead the pain in his shoulder and slowly blunt down the serrated edges of it until he can breath without the scrape of pain across his muscles.

Jyn laughs, a quiet huff of amusement, and darts in to steal a quick kiss against his cheek. Cassian tries to turn his head to catch her lips, but the twinge in his neck slows him down and he misses his chance. “Very educated man, hm?”

“Very,” he agrees vaguely, calculating how he can coax her around to his lap. She won’t go until she feels satisfied about his back, though. Unless he manages to get her worked up enough, perhaps... Carefully, so as not to draw her attention, he slides his right hand onto her knee and traces his fingers lightly up her thigh, as far as he can reach without turning his upper body.

Distracted by his tense left shoulder, she doesn’t notice. “So then what’s the muscle, Professor?”

“Tensor fasciae…” he mumbles, racking his brain for terms he’s heard the doctors throwing over his head during his extremely unpleasant and far too long stay in the MedWard after Scarif. Unfortunately, it also brings up memories of white industrial lights and the stink of antiseptic, and the cold, twisting fear in his guts as he waited to hear if the Death Star plans he’d doomed so many to steal had been recovered, if the Death Star itself had destroyed _another_ planet, if Jyn was still on the base...

Cassian closes his eyes again and shoves those memories as far from his mind as he can manage.

“Cassian?” Jyn presses suddenly against his back, her arms wrapping around his shoulders and her breath in his ear. She felt him sinking into memory, he realizes, and he scowls at himself even as he reaches up and grips her wrists, pulling her in as tight as she can be against him.

“Sorry,” he says roughly. Before she can respond, he swallows and in a calmer voice guesses, “Tensor fasciae lata."

Jyn turns her face into his neck and kisses his pulse point softly, which goes a long way to banishing the chill of his memories. Then she sits back up, although he can feel her chest brushing against his back and knows she hasn’t gone far. She sets her hands on both shoulders this time and kneads at the muscles carefully, skimming her palms up and down the curve of his neck periodically. “You don't know ‘latissimus dorsi’ but you can reel off ‘tenser fascist latte’ or whatever?" she demands. "Seriously, Captain?”

Her light tone clears away the last of the MedWard horrors, and he finds himself smiling again, the warmth in his chest spreading as gratitude adds fuel. He would shrug, but his neck still twinges painfully, so instead Cassian nods slightly. “I didn’t say I was a _thoroughly_ educated man.” There is a place on the inside of her knee, he recalls, that made her gasp and jerk under his hands the last time he’d had her in his arms. He rubs his right hand over her knee and hunts for it again, not trying as hard to keep her attention diverted this time.

She laughs, and the bright warmth in his chest flares higher.

“Give up?” Jyn runs her hands up to his nape and holds them just a millimeter above his skin. Cassian hesitates, wanting to drag on the game, but also knowing that though he is more patient, she is more stubborn. And pathetic or not, he wants her hands on him.

“I give up,” he surrenders softly, and then groans as she digs her fingers into that spot on the nape of his neck immediately, the one that sets half his nerves on fire, the one that simultaneously makes him want to melt under her hands and also turn around and tackle her to the mattress.

“Trapezius,” Jyn says triumphantly, and then her clever, beautiful hands rub soothingly against the soreness in his neck, and the stiff bolt of painful steel that had been rammed through his muscles there all morning finally, _finally_ begins to dissipate and fade. He hadn’t even realized how tightly he’d been holding himself, how badly it hurt to even turn his head, until at last the tension fades under Jyn’s touch. She strokes the easing muscles a little longer, until the sensations beccomes significantly less relaxing for him.

“Jyn,” he murmurs, and in response, she leans forward and kisses the soft spot behind his ear. The flare of heat in his belly slides further down, and he aches to turn and touch her.  If he tries, she will probably shove him right back; he learned quickly that when it came to his health, Jyn can be damn near tyrannical. Not that he minds in this case, as she shifts her weight and kisses the same spot on his other side, lingering a little longer as her fingers dance up and down his spine again. Cassian shivers, and this time he manages to turn his head far enough that he feels her nose brush against his cheek before she is out of reach again.

Cassian sighs and runs his right hand further up her thigh, not bothering to hide the way the movement twists his body, and Jyn reaches down and grabs his wrist before he can find that spot he's searching for. 

“Feel better?” She asks, shuffling out from behind him and sliding to his side.

“Always,” he reassures her, using his trapped wrist to maneuver her around and tugging gently to urge her into his lap. He tries not to let his smile widen too far when she complies, though from the amused look on her face, he doesn’t completely conceal his little flash of triumph.  “Thank you, Jyn.”

She straddles his lap and grazes her fingertips lightly against his throat, tilting her head thoughtfully as she looks at him. “I think,” she says slowly, studying his face with an intensity that should make him uncomfortable but instead merely makes him feel…safe, he supposes. Wanted.

Loved.

“I think,” she starts again, sliding her hands to lock behind his neck, “that I’m happy.”

Cassian takes a deep breath, closes his eyes for a moment, and then buries his hands in her hair, tugging her down so he can (finally, _finally_ ) kiss her breathless.

Some time later, he pulls her body tight against his in the safety of their small, hard bed and whispers against her throat, “So am I.”

 


End file.
